To those who won election or re-election on Tuesday we offer our congratulations and a word of advice:
If you haven’t done so, get yourself three separate email accounts: one personal, one political and one official. And keep them separate and use them only for their intended purposes.
Cascade High School teacher Mike Wilson, who was trailing Mark Harmsworth, 52 percent to 48 percent for the Legislature for Position 2 of the 44th District after Tuesday’s ballot count, was reprimanded Monday by the Everett School District for using school equipment early in his campaign, as reported Monday by The Herald’s Jerry Cornfield. (In the interest of full disclosure, The Herald Editorial Board endorsed Wilson for the Legislature.)
Following a district investigation, Wilson, who cooperated with the investigation and admitted his error, was faulted for using school district equipment to send two emails to campaign supporters and for copying, signing and sending a contract by email to a campaign consultant. (Wilson was cleared of involvement in a separate incident in which students on the cross-country team were asked to go door-belling for Wilson, although two other district employees were reprimanded for their participation.)
State election law prohibits candidates from using public resources, such as a school computer or copy machine, for political campaigns, whether it’s for their own campaign or someone else’s. Wilson may still face an investigation and a fine from the state’s Public Disclosure Commission regarding the emails.
The issue isn’t just the money involved in using public resources for personal or campaign use. What does it cost to send an email? The larger issue is one of transparency and public access to public documents. And it applies as much to non-elected officials, even those who volunteer their service, as it does to elected officials.
Commingling email accounts is part of the reason Snohomish County in September paid out $575,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Sustainable Development, which was stymied for years in its requests for public documents related to the county’s Agricultural Advisory Board. Members of the board used their personal email accounts to conduct advisory board business and balked at providing what were certainly public documents.
Emails related to a public official’s work have to be kept separate from personal and campaign accounts so the public can have reasonably prompt access to them when requested.
We imagine this has been an embarrassing lesson for Wilson, who teaches government at Cascade. But maybe his experience can be a teachable moment for all public officials.
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