The Maine Municipal Association recommends that town governments provide e-mail access for elected officials, and suggests public officials store any messages they send or receive for at least a year.

The idea behind the town providing the service is to avoid confusion between what is a personal e-mail message that happens to involve a public person – such as an e-mail between siblings, one of whom has been elected to local office – and what is a message about the public’s business.

And the second part, that the town or the officials themselves keep messages, is to allow the public access to the e-mails, which are public records under state law, if they relate to government business.

Cape Elizabeth – and all other public entities – should listen to these recommendations, and follow them, as the town does most other MMA guidelines.

This week is Sunshine Week, a week for discussing the importance of the public’s right to know information about our government and how its business is conducted. That includes e-mails.

While no court has tested it, Maine’s Freedom of Access law says any e-mail message relating to government, just as with any other such paper or electronic document, is a public record.

In the past two years, the Current has twice requested e-mail messages from elected officials in Cape Elizabeth.

In late 2003, most of the School Board members attempted to comply when asked for messages to help understand and explain why board member Richard West resigned abruptly after less than six months on the board.

But it was clear from what the Current did receive that some board members regularly deleted their e-mails, while others did so haphazardly. Those actions – though not illegal – limited the amount of information available to the paper, and thereby the public.

The e-mails that did surface – and interviews based on them – shed light on divisions within the board, and were partly responsible for a series of board meetings and retreats that have restored the group to a high level of functioning, while fostering respectful dissent. Without the e-mails, the divisions could have remained hidden, and the problems would have continued to fester, hurting the board’s ability to do the public’s business.

In late 2004, the Current asked members of the Town Council for messages in the continuing search for the reasons Councilor John McGinty resigned suddenly just months after being re-elected. In response to that request, the silence was deafening. It seems nearly every Cape Elizabeth town councilor routinely deletes e-mail messages about public business.

Some councilors stated matter-of-factly that they delete e-mails as a matter of policy, including – even especially – those related to public business.

Town Councilor Mary Ann Lynch said it was her policy not to keep any records relating to town business, whether electronic or in paper, with few exceptions. She invited the Current to her home to search her home computer, if we wished.

It is true a search would have proved she was not hiding anything she actually had. But by deleting the messages, she and her fellow councilors were hiding everything. They even hid any evidence that would have supported their claims that they did not know why McGinty resigned.

That is not the kind of public leadership citizens should be looking for.

Under Maine law, federal law and the general principles of good democracy, the public has a right to know what public officials are saying about the public’s business, and to be privy to those conversations whenever possible.

When officials are able to selectively withhold information – or do so wholesale – about the public’s business, it is democracy that is weaker.

Jeff Inglis, editor