Duluth Mayor Defends Removal Of Long-Standing Group Council Email

DULUTH, Minn. — Duluth Mayor Roger Reinert is defending his administration’s decision to remove a long-standing city email that reached all city councilors at once and was copied to media outlets to allow journalists a better understanding of what issues residents were addressing to the council.

In an email Friday to the media, the city’s public information officer said the group email address, council@duluthmn.gov, was no longer available and the decision was made “increase transparency while making direct district councilor contact easier for residents.”

Individual councilor emails have always been available on the city’s website and have never been copied to the media.

The group council email had a disclaimer that let people know all emails sent to that address were public data.

But Mayor Reinert went into more detail in a post on his Facebook page this weekend to say the group council email was actually “inconsistent with the Minnesota’s Data Practices Act.”

He said, “residents who thought they were writing only to the Council were surprised to later learn their messages had been shared with others, and in some cases published or reported in the media.”

“So, Minnesota state statute says that you as an individual have a right to contact your elected officials and for those communications to be private. Now with … council@duluth.gov, they were actually going to almost 100 different individuals and entities, news organizations, city leadership, me as mayor, just interested individuals who wanted to be copied on all those emails. And while there was a disclaimer, most people didn’t know that so many, many times people were saying, hey, I didn’t know that my email to the council was public information, and in some cases that there was even defamatory or actual harmful information and some of those emails. So, that’s what drove the decision to remove that email address,” Reinert said in a video post.

Reinert ended his post by saying that he appreciates people wanting an easy way to contact councilors, and that the public wants a digital way to provide public comment, just like showing up at a council meeting to speak in person.  He went on to say that he also acknowledges the media wanting an opportunity to see transparency on council-wide conversation.

So in return, Reinert said he expects “an alternative” that will be announced sometime this week.

Meanwhile, longtime city council Arik Forsman released a statement to FOX 21 that reads:

“As Duluth’s longest tenured councilor, it’s important to me that we balance a constituent’s right to privacy and keeping our local media’s ability to know what Duluthians are asking of their city councilors intact. I’m already working closely with Mayor Reinert to find that balance and a solution on this topic.”