Gov. Rick Scott said because he has two accounts, his emails were inadvertently left off the state’s new public information webpage and sometime soon the public should be able to see his electronic correspondence.

“I understand how it happens, there are two separate email accounts, but they made a mistake,” Scott said Wednesday of the omission of all of his email accounts from the three-month-old Sunburst system.

He added that work has already started to correct the mistake, but no timeline was available for when all his accounts would be available.

The Sunburst webpage was created in-house in an effort to make it easier and less expensive for the media to read what key members of the governor’s office are writing to each other and to the public.

Correspondence is supposed to be posted for the public within 24 hours, allowing time for any items such as Social Security numbers, credit card information, weekly national domestic security briefings and other information that is allowed to be withheld to be redacted.

The idea behind Sunburst is to reduce the mountain of time-consuming requests for inner-office correspondence that the Capitol press corps has sought from Gov. Rick Scott and his staff.

To view the email, go to www.flgov.com/sunburst. The user name and password is “sunburst.”

On Monday, the Miami Herald reported that only staff emails from the governor’s office were being made available, while the emails coming in to Scott were from an email address that, while appearing on many tea party websites, was not an official state website.

Integrity Florida, a start-up nonprofit focused on statewide ethics reform, continues to pursue “real-time” access to all state government email.

Dan Krassner, Integrity Florida's executive director, said it remains the hope that Sunburst will “eventually become a model for public access to state government correspondence, but it has a long way to go."

“Alachua County government has a model site that accomplishes automated public access to officials' correspondence,” Krassner said. “If a county government can do it, state government can do it.”

The press corps has hotly pursued Scott’s email since it was revealed that correspondence during the transition period, between his November 2010 election and January 2011 inauguration, had been deleted.  

Scott has since signed a law to require the email be preserved during the transition times.



Reach Jim Turner at jturner@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 215-9889.