Seattle Mayor Durkan's Staff Silent On Private Email Use

SEATTLE, WA - On Thursday evening, the Washington Coalition for Open Government, the state's main advocate for government transparency, went on Twitter to criticize the city of Seattle.

"Hello, dispatch?" they wrote, pretending like they were making a 911 call. "[The city of Seattle] has a transparency problem."

Indeed, a series of revelations over the past week have shown that Seattle city government - the office of Mayor Jenny Durkan in particular — is operating in secret.

Most prominent, the Seattle Times last Friday revealed that Durkan's staff — including Chief of Staff Stephanie Formas and deputy mayors David Moseley, Mike Fong, and Shefali Ranganathan — used private email accounts to discuss the head tax. The mayor's office didn't hand over those emails under an initial public records request. The emails were only disclosed after the Times filed an appeal under the open records law.

On Monday, C is For Crank editor Erica C. Barnett wrote about an experience she had with fudged records. Barnett filed a request for any pre-written social media posts created by the mayor's office. In response, she got multiple copies of one document. However, Barnett already had copies of the documents she requested, indicating her request wasn't filled entirely.

And there's more: Durkan is interviewing candidates to lead SDOT, but her office refuses to share the finalists; city officials conduct polls on their own popularity, but keep them private; on Tuesday, the Seattle Transit Blog wrote in a story that a reporter tried for a week to get a comment from Durkan's office, but got nothing; the Seattle Bike Blog has reported on confidential mediation over the 35th Avenue NE repaving project; on Dec. 6, a group of local media outlets sent a letter asking City Auditor David G. Jones to investigate Durkan and the City Council over transparency (Jones later said "no").

Following the Seattle Times story on the use of private email accounts, Patch sent a set of questions to Formas and communications staffers Mark Prentice and Kamaria Hightower. And while Prentice did respond, he didn't answer the questions — he wouldn't even say he wasn't going to answer them.

The questions we sent were:

• How often do you and other members of the mayor's staff use private email accounts or private cell phones to communicate about city affairs or specific city business?
• Can you provide those email addresses and cell phone numbers?
• Can you provide the names of the staff members who use private accounts (either email or cell phones) to discuss city-related affairs?
• Are these private accounts included in responses to public disclosure requests?
• Does the mayor herself use private email or cell phones to communicate with staff regarding city affairs or political strategy?
• Were the communications referenced in Friday's Seattle Times story the only time the mayor or staff have used private email or cell phone accounts to discuss political business, public affairs, public policy, or any other city-related business?

In response, Prentice shared a letter written in May by Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission Executive Director Wayne Barnett. The letter advises Durkan's staff not to use city resources to advocate for or against a proposed initiative that would have repealed the head tax (this was before the City Council repeal).

It seemed Prentice was using Barnett's letter as kind of blanket response to question about the use of private emails. Asked about this, Barnett said his letter was pretty specific to the head tax issue.

"I reminded all the electeds in that letter about the prohibition on using public resources to promote or oppose a candidate or a ballot measure," he wrote to Patch in an email. "It's a small blanket!"

The last email we sent to Prentice asking for comment read in part: "Again, I am asking about the use of private email accounts IN GENERAL. Not just the head tax, but in any instance at all. You have my questions, I've sent them multiple times, just let me know if you will anwer [sic] them or not."

That was Wednesday at 7:14 p.m. Prentice hasn't responded.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated which outlet was unable to get a response from Durkan’s office about the SDOT director search.

File photo by Neal McNamara/Patch