Public’S Business Conducted Via E-Mail Computer Messages Replacing Meetings At County Commission

Spokane County commissioners are finding ways to conduct the public’s business even when they’re not in the same room.

A review of commissioners’ electronic mail messages shows that they occasionally discuss issues with each other from the privacy of their keyboards.

Employee pay, lease agreements for publicly owned lands and a District Court request for an administrator are some of the topics commissioners discussed in recent months without meeting face to face - and without an audience.

Whether the conversations were legal is open to interpretation.

“The courts really haven’t addressed it yet,” said Bob Meinig of the Municipal Research Center in Kirkland, Wash. “It’s one of those things where the law really hasn’t caught up with new technology.”

Under state law, a quorum of elected officials cannot conduct the public’s business in private.

For large boards like the Spokane City Council, the law isn’t particularly onerous. Three of the seven council members can meet without notifying the public. It only becomes a meeting, with public notice required 24 hours in advance, when four council members gather.

With just three commissioners, no two are supposed to discuss issues outside of a public meeting. If they carpool to work, bump into each other in hallways or socialize at parties, county business legally can’t enter into the conversation.

“Probably the most difficult arena to get precise compliance of the (law) is with those entities that are headed by three people,” said Chip Holcomb of the state attorney general’s office. “It would seem that it would be literally impossible to comply with the letter of the law.”

A Spokesman-Review analysis last year showed that many local governing boards violate public meetings laws by meeting behind closed doors. But that analysis considered only face-to-face gatherings, not other forms of communication where the law is vague.

In past written opinions, the state attorney general’s office has warned that telephone discussions between officials qualify as meetings under the state’s definition, said Michael Killeen, a Seattle attorney who specializes in public access issues.

But the courts have ruled that a single memo from one official to another is not a meeting, he said. It’s unclear whether it becomes a meeting if officials send written notes about a subject back and forth.

Comparing e-mail to paper memos, “I would think it’d be more like a meeting because of the rapidity and the interactivity,” Killeen said. “It comes somewhere between a phone conversation and a memo.”

E-mail has been available to county employees since the mid-1980s. But the system was difficult to use and largely ignored until the mid-1990s.

Commissioner Phil Harris rarely uses e-mail. John Roskelley and Kate McCaslin are the first Spokane County commissioners to use it extensively.

“It’s not uncommon for me to be out of the office all day on (county) business and have 80 to 100 e-mails when I return,” said McCaslin, who notes that most of her messages involve administrative issues.

The alternative to e-mail, she said, would be endless rounds of phone tag. Some business would never get done.

“It would be impossible to keep up. To me, it is a matter of efficiency.”

Holcomb said there’s an advantage to the public when officials use computers rather than telephones to talk to each other.

“Exchanging e-mail at least creates a record of the conversation as opposed to talking on the phone or meeting in the hall,” he said. However, most e-mail messages eventually are deleted, and can be deleted immediately, if the person receiving the mail desires.

Under state public records laws, The Spokesman-Review recently obtained about 900 e-mail messages stored on commissioners’ computers as of Nov. 23, 1998. The date was selected because the data was easily retrieved by county technicians.

Some of the messages were more than four months old.

Most of the e-mail was sent between a single commissioner and staff. Sometimes those messages were copied to the other two commissioners, giving them the opportunity to read the conversation even if they chose not to participate.

In fewer cases, Roskelley and McCaslin sent messages directly to each other, usually copied to Harris.

Such was the case in November, when Roskelley listed reasons why managers should receive the same cost-of-living increase as union members. McCaslin wanted raises based on merit.

“Good grief, John,” she wrote. “First, we’re talking about 2 percent for people who already by and large make a lot of money. If they are doing a good job, then what are they afraid of?”

In another instance, Roskelley detailed six reasons why the county should ask for top dollar if it leased a small strip of land to a Liberty Lake business. McCaslin agreed in a return memo to drop the lease agreement Roskelley opposed.

Likewise, McCaslin laid out her reasons for wanting to wait until 1999 to appoint an administrator for District Court. “Those are my thoughts,” she concluded. “I would be interested in hearing yours and any thoughts on how we are going to address the issue.”

Roskelley was out of the office Friday, and could not be reached for comment. But he stated his position on conducting business by computer in an e-mail message to McCaslin.

“Former commissioners did not manage as effectively as we do, given e-mail and our personalities,” he wrote.

This sidebar appeared with the story: PUSHING THE ENVELOPE Under state law, a quorum of elected officials cannot conduct the public’s business in private meetings. In past written opinions, the state attorney general’s office has warned that telephone discussions between officials qualify as meetings, said Michael Killeen, a Seattle attorney who specializes in public access issues. But the courts have ruled that a single memo from one official to another is not a meeting.