Not Our Idea of Transparency (Editorial)

It’s a relatively small point in the latest episode of How the Sausage Is Made, our front-page story about the hiring of inexperienced, overpriced lawyers to do a job for state Auditor Andrea Lea, but it’s important: Only because a former staff member alerted us to their existence did Lea’s office turn over emailed notes about staff meetings with lawyers who wanted the job.

George Franks, who was Lea’s chief of staff during her first six months in office last year, took the notes and sent them from his personal email address to her personal email address. This was as she wanted it, Franks said, and was SOP when he worked for Lea. Yes, the very same Andrea Lea who, as a candidate, declared, “Transparency should be the foundation of any public office.”

Skot Covert, Lea’s spokesman, says the auditor uses her personal email very little. That’s the kind of claim that’s impossible to prove or disprove without the auditor’s cooperation. We hope it is true, or will be from now on, but this much is undeniable: Routine business of the state auditor’s office was being conducted outside official channels and would have escaped public scrutiny had we depended on the auditor’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The issue of government officials using private email accounts has been much in the news, you may have noticed, and was last summer when Lea’s staff was sending emails about official business to her private account. Even if she wasn’t concerned about the disconnect between her promise of transparency and her practice of opacity — campaign promises are easily forgotten — you’d think Lea would have noticed that using private emails for public business simply isn’t acceptable.