By Staff
If he were a rookie town councilman, you might be able to forgive him.
But Mike Easley isn’t. He’s the governor of the state of North Carolina, a former N.C. attorney general and a former district attorney. Easley should know the state’s public records laws by now.
The governor is caught up in a controversy over his handling of records involving mental-health reforms. But it isn’t the first time the governor’s office has been in the spotlight over public records.
A year ago, Easley’s office said it simply lost an anonymous letter that was the catalyst for the State Bureau of Investigation’s probe into what some folks call Chickengate in Beaufort County.
The Chickengate letter was sent to the attorney general’s office in 2006, and its contents were enough to get the SBI to look into a May 2006 meeting between commissioners’ Chairman Jay McRoy, Commissioner Robert Cayton, then-school board Chairman Bryant Hardison and school board member F. Mac Hodges. The site of the meeting — King Chicken restaurant — has garnered the investigation its name on the street.
The letter, even as an anonymous one, was a public document.
Amanda Martin said the notion of Easley’s office not keeping up with letters just because they’re anonymous “strikes me as implausible … or as bad public policy.”
The latest flap isn’t over an anonymous one. According to Easley, he received a handwritten note from Carmen Hooker Odom, the former DHHS secretary, and then “I chunked it.”
The governor said Hooker Odom’s letter was personal correspondence that did not “discuss anything of public consequence” and so is not subject to the records law. “It was never intended to be public. Carmen sent me a handwritten personal note. It didn’t have anything to do with public policy. It’s not a public record, not something that I’m required to log and maintain. I read it and disposed of it,” he said.
So we must take him at his word?
Easley also said he habitually disposes of mail: “When I read something, unless it’s charts or something or budgetary stuff, when I read it I get rid of it. I throw it away.”
John Bussian, a lawyer for the N.C. Press Association, said that isn’t Easley’s call.
Debbie Crane, whom Easley fired as chief spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said governor’s press-office officials had for years instructed colleagues in various agencies to delete e-mail messages, which are public records under state law, to the governor’s office.
We also find it rather funny that Easley has declared March 20 as Sunshine Day — an effort to highlight the importance of open government. Easley needs to let the sun shine on his own administration and live up to the spirit of the public-records law.