Taxpayer Funded Public Distribution Email Lists Not Private, Says Westchester County Municipal Clerks President

Anyone with a computer can get email blasts from the the privilege political class of their town or village trumpeting what a wonderful job they are doing. These often come in the form of "Village Newsletters" that amount to year around taxpayer funded puff pieces for incumbent politicians.

The privileged political class uses taxpayer funded equipment, resources and email addresses year around to inform voters what a great job their incumbent politicians are doing.

But many grassroots community organizations are learning that these town and village email lists are public records under terms of recent decisions on state regulations, and they may be released to those outside of a communities privilege political class.

In the Village of Briarcliff Manor, some local citizens critical of proposed school tax increases and the budgeting process behind them, shocking the privilege political class, who thought they had a monopoly on the public signup list.

Westchester County Municipal Clerks and Finance Officers Association President And Briarcliff Manor Village Clerk Christine Dennett now states,“It’s public information.”

Dennett said the list was turned over after a Freedom of Information request was filed, under the state law that promotes public access to government records.

“It was a FOIA request for our email list. We had to release them,” she said.

Dennett said the village administration initially denied the request, but an appeal was filed, and after consulting with the state’s open-government committee, it shared the public email list with their opponents.

The only prohibition on the use of the email list is that it not be used for financial gain, like soliciting money, she said.

Hon. Victoria Gearity
Village Of Ossining Mayor

There have been repeated releases of Ossining village’s municipal email list going back several years, Mayor Victoria Gearity's office

According to Ossining employees, who wished to remain anonymous, "Certain things have to be removed like the names of residents instance, but the lists has been repeatedly given out”

At Briarcliff Manor Village Hall a handful of residents questioned about the policy offered little opposition to it, with some reservations.

Resident Stuart Halper saw no harm in the release of an email address. “If you want to be on a public list, you have to expect it. It’s not exactly private.”

The law tends to follow the same attitude.

Robert Freeman
New York State Department Of State

Robert Freeman, the head of the state’s open government committee who consulted with Briarcliff Manor officials, said there was no state law on the issue, but the prevailing belief is that email addresses are not held to a high standard of privacy.

The general legal test, Freeman has written, is whether communication rises to the level of an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” and the release of an email address does not rise to that level.

“It’s not like a phone, a phone that rings during dinner, it’s an intrusion,” Mr. Freeman has said at Freedom of Information presentations, “An email, people delete them before they even open them. It’s less of an intrusion.”

Two village residents who have been using Briarcliff Manor’s email list, Paul Wasserman and Aaron Stern to be critical of proposed school tax increases and the budgeting process behind them,

Most village resident's feel the village's privilege political class should not be the only ones to use the public list, especially since they use it to constantly push for higher and higher taxes on the single family homeowners of Briarcliff.

Hon. Gary Zuckerman
Rye Town Supervisor

The topic has come up informally among municipal officials in Rye Brook with the current Rye Town Supervisor Gary Zuckerman wanting to use the village's tax funded general email address,

However, the villages privileged political class brokered a backroom deal that Mr. Zuckerman would not ask for the list unless the other political party asked for it too. 

There have been whispers that concern citizen's in Rye Brook opposed to Mayor Rosenberg's rabid pushing for the sustainable project that will automatically change every resident's electric supplier, but these residents were strongly discouraged from filing a Freedom Of Information Request for the public taxpayer funded list used to promote the activities of incumbents.

The privilege political class live in fear that an accountability or transparency gadfly gets a copy of a taxpayer funded general distribution town or village list. 

Alex HalavaisQuinnipiac University

Alexander Halavais, an expert on social media, said the Briarcliff case is an example of the shifting expectations about privacy and what constitutes confidential data. It also reveals a generational divide.

 “It’s evolving. If I asked my students, they wouldn’t expect their e-mail addresses to be private. But there was a time when you tried to keep that under wraps. A lot of people don’t have that feeling, but a lot of people still do. It’s such a moving target,” said Halavais, a professor of Communication at Quinnipiac University..
Privacy also depends on who’s doing the looking. “If large companies and government have access to your data, that’s a much more serious issue, that’s much more intrusive than if it’s your neighbor,” he said. 

Especially if your neighbor is a single family homeowner struggling to pay a town, village or school's yearly demands for tax increases.

Please See Legal Reference Notes Below;

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NOTES: 
The Freedom of Information Law is based upon a presumption of access.  Stated differently, all records of an agency are available, except to the extent that records or portions thereof fall within one or more grounds for denial appearing in §87(2)(a) through (j) of the Law.

As you know, when records are accessible under the Freedom of Information Law, it has been held that they should be made equally available to any person, regardless of one's status, interest or the intended use of the records [see Burke v. Yudelson, 368 NYS 2d 779, aff'd 51 AD 2d 673, 378 NYS 2d 165 (1976)].  Moreover, the Court of Appeals, the State's highest court, has held that:

"FOIL does not require that the party requesting records make any showing of need, good faith or legitimate purpose; while its purpose may be to shed light on government decision-making, its ambit is not confined to records actually used in the decision-making process.  (Matter of Westchester Rockland Newspapers v. Kimball, 50 NY2d 575, 581.)  Full disclosure by public agencies is, under FOIL, a public right and in the public interest, irrespective of the status or need of the person making therequest" [Farbman v. New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, 62 NY 2d 75, 80 (1984)].

The only exception to the principles described above involves a provision pertaining to the protection of personal privacy. 
Names and residence addresses are widely available, irrespective of the purpose for which they are requested in the form of voter registration lists available under §5-602 of the Election Law and assessment records available under both §516 of the Real Property Tax Law and new provisions added to the Freedom of Information Law [see §89(2)(c)(iv)] concerning disclosure.

New York Courts have ruled that email communications involve a lesser invasion of privacy than a person’s name or home address, because an email address do not divulge the geographic location of a person’s home, and in many instances does not include a person’s name or other identifying information.  

Further, individuals may maintain multiple email accounts, reserving one for internet business and another for social communications.