Councilman wants his e-mail to be open book

It's a small thing, but in the suspicious minds of citizens, every effort counts.

That's why Renton City Councilman Randy Corman has asked that his e-mail go into a file that anyone can rifle through and read, right there at City Hall.

"I want it to all be as public as possible," said Corman, who has his own personal Web site, where he explains his votes on certain issues. "We're going to look like a more open and happening city."

Since Corman announced his intention over e-mail, several other City Council members have decided to follow suit.

Maybe, just maybe, they said, this will cut down on the rocketing number of public-disclosure requests. At the very least, it could take the mystique out of their decision-making, showing how boring their e-mail can be.

"I think people have an idea that we are trading a lot of secret information through e-mail," said Councilman Dan Clawson. "Really, a lot of it is very mundane."

The public is already entitled to see any e-mail to or from City Council members, provided that the messages do not discuss confidential matters such as legal action or personnel issues. But it usually takes a public-records request to access the e-mail, plus time and energy on the part of the city staff to find the relevant documents. Spam and other meaningless e-mail will not be included in the public file.

In deciding to make his e-mail more public, Corman took some inspiration from the state Attorney General's Office, which has pushed in recent years for local politicians to make public records more accessible.

Some cities, like Bellevue, are trying hard to put as many public documents as possible online. In other cities, like Olympia, council members' e-mails are kept on CDs, available to the public by request.

Greg Overstreet, special assistant attorney general for government accountability, said he had not yet heard of council members making their e-mails available in public files.

"I think it's a great idea," said Overstreet. "It takes the middleman out of the process of getting public records."

The city of Renton received nearly 190 written requests for public records in 2006 — the most ever, and more than twice that of the previous year, according to the city clerk. Many requests involved e-mails.

At some point, one citizen filed a public-records request to find out how many public-records requests another citizen had made. The city answered that inquiry last week. Inez Petersen, a 61-year-old retired computer programmer, has written about 45 percent of the requests filed over the past year.

She was not pleased to hear about Corman's effort to make e-mail more accessible. The move would make it more difficult for her to find pertinent information, she said. Faced with folders full of e-mails, she would not know where to begin.

"It's like saying, 'Here's the haystack, go find the needle,' " she said.

Petersen's requests range from a list of city contractors to all correspondence over the past six years that mentioned her by name. She was acting on a tip on that last request; she had heard that one council member wrote "I hate Inez" repeatedly over e-mail.

"I never did find the 'I hate Inez' e-mail," she said.

She did, however, find herself described as a "cranky individual" in one message. Which leads to Corman's second hope: that by putting their e-mails on display, people will become more civil in conversation.

"Inside e-mail, there's name-calling that occurs, there's crazy assumptions that people make, there's unsubstantiated reframing of issues," Corman said. "And I'm not just talking about constituents — often it's other public officials that are doing it."

For her part, Mayor Kathy Keolker said she could not understand why the extra e-mail folder was necessary. Citizens already can fill out a form and get nearly any public document they want. This seemed to her to add another layer of work for city staffers. And why would anyone want immediate access to Corman's correspondence, anyway?

"His e-mail must be more interesting than mine," she said.

Cara Solomon: 206-464-2024 or csolomon@seattletimes.com