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City wants $1,700+ to release copies of e-mails related to GE deal
By adamg on Wed, 03/23/2016 - 8:20am
Muckrock reports that when a couple of reporters asked the mayor's office for copies of e-mail between GE and city officials, the mayor's office said it would be more than happy to hand over copies of the roughly 2,500 messages - for $1,746.24.
Because we have a pretty spineless public-records law, Muckrock has launched a crowdsourcing campaign to raise the money to get the e-mails.
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Comments
Nah not a smidgen of
Nah not a smidgen of corruption at City Hall.
Might as well give some land out to some developer buddies way under market value and rubber stamp Urban Renewal against the wishes of the neighborhoods while they are at it.
Nothing Changes
At least this time they're not claiming they "lost" them after deliberately purging them.
Of course not
You only claim the server failed after receiving the check.
Even then
That can be argued.. I'd like to think the IT department for the city and state would enable archiving because its of public record. Users can think they delete all they want, but in reality every email is copied to a repository.
I have this feature enabled on my email system.. for us in Office365 its called "Litigation Hold" so people cannot delete emails.
If they do not do this.. very much shame on the city's IT department for not doing so, but it would surprise me if they didn't already enable this feature.
So, no, I don't buy the excuse they were 'deleted' or 'purged'..
Of course this only applies to @cityofboston.gov emails and not anyone personal email accounts, which many people may use instead because they know their email is being watched and archived.
You mean people in high places shouldn't use private servers
There oughta be rules against that.
Oh wait...
Like Palin?
Conducting all state business - with her husband included - over Yahoo mail? Then whining that someone found all the info because her husband used the name of his snow machine as a password?
No excuse for her
On any level.
But that was 15 years ago. The risks today are much greater and more well known by anyone with an ounce of common sense. Kind of like maybe you had an excuse to smoke in 1945. If you started smoking in 1975 and say - "Why did I get lung cancer?" doesn't get a lot of sympathy.
Never said any of that
I never said any of that.. but thanks for trying to make a Hillary connection there.
Just stating how it SHOULD work from an IT Manager's perspective who has had to deal with litigation issues in the past.
You didn't have to
The inference is pretty obvious for anyone who thinks that the rules apply to everyone - of course unless your last name is Clinton. You said it best - this is how it SHOULD work - and in this day and age you don't have to be an IT manager to know that. It's common sense for ANYONE dealing with confidential information.
I thought you were a Bernie supporter anyway?
I am
I am a bernie supporter..
I was just explain for the non-technical folks who read Uhub on how it SHOULD work. :-)
You'd be surprised at how many office workers do not know their email or internet browsing is being monitored. Some suspect, but many do not know how it all works. Just explaining it for those who don't know.
Sorry, nature of my day job.. I'm constantly explaining coworkers how stuff works. But then again, that is why they keep me on the payroll because I can break it down fairly easily for people.
She violated the spirit of the law, not the letter
The laws changed re: storage of records after Clinton left the role of Secretary of State. She did not break the letter of the law. The spirit of it, maybe? But not the letter.
One of the potential problems is that the City went over to GMail a couple years ago. Cloud records are much more difficult to manage, versus locally managed servers.
GMail Fails But Is Outlook Any Better?
As much as everyone loves to dump on Outlook I would take a PST for discovery over a MBOX file ANY day. But collecting them can be tricky if its not a complete pull off the exchange server. Partial or selective discovery is just awful. People try to do things like use the Outlook or Gmail search function to determine what gets posted, and it's just such a joke. Then they wonder why that email they sent isn't in the review set.
Yes
It's better :-)
tell me about it. Outlook/Office365 makes it fairly easy to do. I did my last discovery in about 20 minutes (which is about how long it took to run the discovery tool). Then it spit it all out to a downloadable PST.
Exchange Server is even easier.
Duplicate post
Deleted
Damn that UR.
I wrote a letter to my councillor asking them to oppose the BRA's request. Just like all letters I send them, it was most likely shredded as soon as it was received.
No way.
Don't pay them anything. They get paid enough. Those documents need to all be accessible to the citizens who live in, and pay taxes in Boston. I'm in favor of stuffing their inboxes (virtual and real) full of demand letters.
Anyone else want to do the same?
Why not $10k?
$50k? $100k?
If you're going to be a dick about it, might as be a big dick.
As a former Keeper of the Records
for a city agency, I can attest to the fact that these "estimates" are provided based on how inclined the agency is to do the work required to produce the records and what information is contained therein. At my former agency we had horrendous record storage, so even the most simple requests to an outsider would require enormous effort on my part. The public records law fails for a lot of reasons, but no one ever talks about how it fails to set explicit requirements and consequences for electronic storage of records to facilitate production. Hopefully one of the laws currently proposed will fix this issue.
Usually production of email isn't that difficult, unless there is redaction involved, which then requires printing and a low-level person or people to sit and painstakingly ensure every thing that needs to be redacted is caught, lest they miss a detail and have to suffer the consequences and get reamed out because a law was broken by releasing information that was in some way protected or more likely, because someone's dirty laundry just got aired.
For larger time-consuming requests we'd often try to whittle down to specifics. And for really obnoxious requests, we quoted large numbers to dissuade people. And yes, we did get a slap on the wrist several times from the Secretary of State's office and were ultimately ordered to produce the records, but the initial push back bought us the time required to find /dig up records and redact and produce.
Screw you GE, Marty, and Baker
Lost in the glamour of having a medium sized office relocate to Boston is that the fact GE greatly polluted the Housatonic River in Western MA with toxic waste for 50 years and is disputing the $600+ million bill to clean it up. The company has a long track record of walking away or fighting horrible environmental destruction.
It's basic common sense but there should still be a law prohibiting any "incentives" with firms currently in litigation with the state. Baker is hardly going to put much effort into this long running and important case if he's simultaneously bending over backwards to get a relatively small office moved to an already red hot real estate market.
Things like this are despicable. But hey, so long as some millionaires get a nice office and low taxes it's cool, right
Don't forget the helipad.
We can't have those rich people take the T with the rest of us...
Your joke is what gets to me
I don't disagree with you, but many people see the tax deal as one of those neutral things politicians are always doing: Maybe it will help, maybe not, but few are directly effected by GE moving to Boston or the tax cuts they get.
Contrast that to the Housatonic river where the effects of the solution has likely made and will continue to make people sick. It's a major problem which will stick around long after another city has wooed GE away when their Boston leases are up. But because it's far away and has existed for a long time people forget about it and focus on the superficial stuff like the helipad. (I too have joked about it.)
What is forgotten is that GE only became a big rich company by exploiting small towns and natural resources. In essence they've already gotten their "tax incentive" a thousand times over.
How would Worcester handle this?
As long as they're putting runs on the scoreboard and all
Public records law is a joke
I have extensive experience requesting public records from local and state entities and the public records law is a joke. In one case, the school department of one municipality wanted $50,000 for emails between public officials. Turns out the school committee members had exchanged an average of 3 emails a day among themselves and violated the open meeting law dozens of times. In essence the school committee was holding regular, extensive secret meetings *daily* with no public knowledge. When caught, they set an amount of money so high that no one would pay to prove and uncover their illegal behavior.
Of course, residents voted these same people back into office. So weak, closed government is the fault of voters and public officials reflect their will.
Unless there is personal liability for this form of insidious corruption there will be no good government possible.
In this case, don't pay them a penny, figure out a way to make it a federal law suit and bring in the Feds to send someone to jail. It is the only way to hold a Massachusetts official accountable,
residents voted these same people back
This really is a big part of the problem. Who are you going to vote for though? The thief or the crook?
Unfortunately, elections for
Unfortunately, elections for things like school boards normally go uncontested. These same people were likely voted back into office because no one ran against them.
How do you vet the school board members?
Unless a school board member takes a radical public position (no evolution teaching, etc) it's really hard to vet these people to know who is good and who is a turkey. They all say the same things.
Same goes with most local officials. It's hard to be an informed voter when there's no information.
Format?
Is this for a CD or paper copies?
It's a bit early, but
make sure you're registered to vote when election time comes around next year.
A lot of us are fed up with Marty's empty promises, backdoor dealings, and complete disregard for the residents of our city. This is your chance to take it beyond the comments section and do something about it. If you don't live in the city, talk to your friends and family that do.
Only problem is....
his one "challenger" so far seems to be Tito, he of the $2200 campaign fund and equally limited scruples. Marty and his minions will squash him like a bug, but if you know of a real contender, do tell.
I'll kick some money in for Tito 2017
2017 is right around the corner.
Wu? Pressley?
They both seem ambitious enough that they might want to do something more than sit around on the City Council. Council is a nice gig if you don't actually want to get anything done (see Murphy, Steven and countless others) but it's not a great stepping stone to statewide or federal elected office.
The tricky part is that there's no real albatross of a decision to hang on Walsh's neck to justify running against him. He's clearly in with a lot of the Dem. power brokers so I think a challenger would need a real debacle of some sort to kick off a campaign.
He's clearly in with a lot of the Dem. power brokers
Unions too!
Yep
Unfortunately, I suspect we'll have to all suffer some serious negative impacts before he's out. Such as a economic downturn meets the inexorably rising city payroll meets the unfunded health care liabilities of the city retirees leading to total budget meltdown. Ask Stevil for more details.
Or he finally leverages the wrong hack into the wrong position and it rebounds on him. That seems unlikely though as the various grifters publicized in the Globe and beyond don't seem to reflect poorly on Walsh yet.
I like the idea of Wu.
I like the idea of Wu.
The albatross to hang around Walsh's neck is his insistence on giving tax payer money away to One Percenters every chance he gets. Formula 1, GE, 2024 Olympics, selling the Winthrop Garage for pennies on the dollar. If only Marty cared about Bostonians as much as he cares about out of town millionaires and billionaires.
None of those are enough
They just aren't enough to move the needle of a largely complacent electorate who are seeing their home values rise, employment rates remain high, etc...
Not saying they aren't problems, but they aren't big enough debacles to significantly help a challenger.
Civic participation
OFFERED BY COUNCILORS MICHELLE WU AND TIM MCCARTHY
CITY OF BOSTON
IN CITY COUNCIL
AN ORDINANCE ESTABLISHING LANGUAGE AND
COMMUNICATIONS ACCESS FOR CITY SERVICES
http://meetingrecords.cityofboston.gov/sirepub/cache/2/b41nt0rkcebzzbtfu...
meetingrecords. cityofboston. gov/sirepub/cache/2/b41nt0rkcebzzbtfub2cgeyt/16548103232016083458408. PDF
WHEREAS: The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids discrimination or prejudice based on color, religion, gender, or nationality; AND
WHEREAS: In the United States, cities are recognizing that in order to serve their residents, they must accommodate or cater to different forms of communication and languages; AND
WHEREAS: According to the United States Census, more than 25 percent of Boston residents are foreign-born, and more than 35 percent of residents speak a language other than English at home; AND
WHEREAS: An estimated 10.6 percent of Boston residents have visual or hearing impairments; AND
WHEREAS: City services should not be withheld intentionally or unintentionally from those who are unable to communicate through the dominant language or common forms of communication; AND
WHEREAS: It is the City’s responsibility to ensure that all city services are accessible and equally attainable to all people in the City of Boston regardless of linguistic barriers, or physical or visual impairment; AND
WHEREAS: The Boston City Council, in partnership with Mayor Walsh and several departments led by the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians, created a Communications Access Working Group in November 2014 that evaluated departmental needs and best practices for communications access over the course of a year; NOW THEREFORE BE IT ORDERED,
That the following shall take effect immediately upon passage:
The City of Boston through its departments shall implement a communications access policy for residents who may have a disability, who are English language learners or Limited English speakers.
Each department head in the City of Boston shall create a specific plan for his or her department. This will include all the components listed below.
Each department shall present its customized communications access plan to an oversight committee composed of representatives from the Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians, Mayor’s Commission for Persons with Disabilities, Office of Fair Housing & Equity, the Department of Neighborhood Development, and other public-facing City departments. This oversight committee will serve as the centralized enforcement entity for the Communications Access ordinance.
The Office of New Bostonians will manage any contracts for translating written documents and providing telephonic interpretation requested by departments. There will be a Communications Access Coordinator, who will handle equipment, translation and interpretation requests and serve as a liaison between city departments and the Office of New Bostonians in matters of language access and the Commission on Persons with Disabilities in matters of assistive technology and disability access.
Each department will undergo an annual review to evaluate expenses, performance and frequency of service delivery to Limited English Speaking residents and residents with disabilities. In addition to this review, there will be a survey for all residents of Boston on the City of Boston website in the top four languages where constituents can rate and review their interactions with city departments. This review will be conducted by the Office of New Bostonians and will be released to the public along with the results of the online survey.
Below is an outline of criteria that should be met by each department:
Definitions:
http://meetingrecords.cityofboston.gov/sirepub/cache/2/b41nt0rkcebzzbtfu...
Walsh reneged on a detailed
Walsh reneged on a detailed promise to replace the BRA in his first year of office.
http://www.universalhub.com/2013/election-roundup-walsh-would-replace-br...
Only $2,200 because
He keeps charging in $200 for Chef Chow chinese food for "staff meetings".
It's early yet
We'll see who steps up to the plate when the time comes. It should be just as much about getting someone who can do the job in our best interest in, as getting the guy who doesn't out. Whether that's Jackson, Wu, or someone we haven't heard from yet remains to be seen.
Civic engagement.
There shouldn't be a second charge funding it because it's a matter of easy software operation transferring electronically public information for greater civic engagement. Public funds from the budget already paid for material in use creating the public information http://www.cityofboston.gov/budget/