Editorial: Public emails warrant the ‘Right-to-know’

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sued the state Monday over the executive branch’s current email retention policy.

In Commonwealth Court, the newspaper asked a judge to end the current policy, in which public officials’ are allowed to permanently destroy their emails after only five days. Appealing to Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, the Post-Gazette has asked for the state to preserve public emails for at least two years.

The Right-to-Know Law asserts that the state must provide “access to public information, for a designated open-records officer in each Commonwealth agency, local agency, judicial agency and legislative agency.”

With that in mind, the Post-Gazette certainly has a case here — the state would be hard-pressed to prove that emails sent by civil servants while on the job don’t constitute “public information.” After all, the will of the public doesn’t just come to an end after laws are passed — it is up to civil servants to make sure the laws are then properly administered.

But when Ron Tomalis, the former special adviser on higher education to governor  Corbett, can only produce five total emails sent in a year’s time, it is certainly hard for the public to know exactly what he was doing, if anything.

Coincidentally, Tomalis resigned two weeks after the Post-Gazette reported on his lack of emails — they appealed to the Right-to-Know Law then as well.

According to the Post-Gazette, Acting Education Department Secretary Carolyn Dumaresq claimed that she and her agency co-workers “delete and cleanse” their emails on a nightly basis.

State officials like Dan Egan, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Office of Administration, claim that the deletion of emails makes it easier to locate relevant records.

Still, only five total emails sent in one year calls for concern — and for good reason.

For the executive branch, or more specifically the bureaucracy, to implement policy effectively, it must be held accountable. If there’s no accountability, there’s no incentive to keep the bureaucracy from straying from policy or just deviating from the public will in general.

So, who holds the bureaucracy in check?

A large part of this job belongs to the legislative branch, as they appoint members of the bureaucracy and allocate funding to different agencies. But, this responsibility also falls on media outlets like the Post-Gazette. Media outlets keep track of government officials and agents to make sure that they are acting on the public’s behalf. Obviously, it’s hard to play watchdog if there’s nothing there to see.

So, because of the current email retention policy, news outlets like the Post-Gazette cannot properly report on government action — or inaction — to their constituency, which undermines the effective implementation of policy as it doesn’t provide adequate pressure on civil servants to do so.

Thus, as trivial as emails may seem, a win for the Post-Gazette will equate to a win for government efficiency and, in a way, for the democratic process.