This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
On Monday December 16th, Longmont City Clerk Dawn Quintana responded to follow up questions regarding the open records request filed by Longmont resident Regina Cheyney. In the request, Cheyney requested all emails sent by City Council Members Joan Peck and Polly Christensen where they conducted city business using their personal email accounts. In the update, Quintana revealed that her search of city servers determined that additional search terms would be required to respond to the request. Those search terms included two previously undisclosed private email addresses for Peck and Christensen. The new search terms resulted in an additional 2,000 records over the initial estimate of 1,600 which were responsive to Cheyney's request.
In Quintana's original message dated December 6th outlining her procedure, she noted that she asked Peck and Christensen to voluntarily provide any emails from their personal accounts responsive to the request. Quintana also implied that she relied on the two council members to disclose their personal email addresses, "we executed a query on our servers of the personal email addresses of both council members." The email address provided by Peck was a Gmail account, whereas Christensen's email was an Indra account.
The Longmont Observer was aware of an additional email address for Peck hosted by Indra and has been attempting to independently determine whether Peck deliberately withheld the existence of the email account from Quintana. The day Quintana's original process email was sent, we verified with Quintana by phone that she would only be searching for a Gmail account for Peck and not an Indra account.
In Quintana's December 16th update, she says she "learned" of the Indra account owned by Peck and additionally a Gmail account owned by Christensen. Quintana did not explain the source of her information but did not explicitly say the email accounts were discovered during the normal course of reviewing the first 1,600 emails.
Quintana also made available the initial results of her search of the first 1,600 emails. Of those:
- 169 were disclosed
- 177 are still under legal review by City Attorney Eugene Mei
- 837 were not responsive
- 344 were duplicates
- 52 were contact information of other persons and thus not responsive to the request for emails
- 36 were confidential or were exceptions to the Colorado Open Records Act because they contained information considered to be of commercial value (such as information from companies seeking tax incentives to locate in Longmont), or related to a 2017 sexual harassment complaint.
The Longmont Observer intends to publish all records obtained from Quintana related to this investigation, however, has not yet done so pending its own review of the documents.
