For the past year, the Capitol press corps has inundated Gov. Rick Scott and his staff for their inner-office correspondence.

On Thursday, Scott unveiled a webpage called Sunburst that will make it easier and less expensive for the media to read what key members of the governor’s office are writing among each other and to the public.

It will also now be easier for the public to read questions the media are asking of the governor and deduce and assess what stories are being worked on and their approach to them.

“This is a big step forward for transparency,” Scott said Thursday as he introduced the Sunburst webpage. “You don’t have to wait, the public doesn’t have to wait for a lot of things. You don’t have go through for information to the Office of Open Government to get information quicker.”

Scott’s official email, along with that of some key staff, including Chief of Staff Stephen MacNamara, Deputy of Staff Chris Finkbeiner, Legislative Affairs Director Jon Costello and Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, will be available to the public within a week of being received or sent.

The potential lag time is needed to ensure that items such as Social Security numbers, credit card information, weekly national domestic security briefings and other information that is allowed to be withheld are properly redacted before the email is released.

Only email since May 1 will be available on the webpage.  

Public records requests for email prior to that date will continue to be honored, Scott said.

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

The page was created in-house. No estimate has been made for what the site will cost to make hard copies of requested emails.

Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation in Tallahassee, hailed the ruling for making access more affordable.

The first two months of 2011, the First Amendment Foundation made weekly requests for emails from the governor and top staff members on behalf of the press corps. The last of the requested information was received in December.

“It cost me about $5,000, which was why we had to quit doing it,” Petersen said. “So, if we think of it in just terms of ease of access and cost, it’s huge.”

She hopes that the site is expanded to include more agencies and staff, and that other agencies in the state follow suit.

“I’m working with a woman right now who is being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get access to a city commission’s email,” Petersen said.

“If the governor can do this, and relatively easily at no cost, why can’t everybody?”

The press corps has held a fervor for 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.  

A Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation into the deletion continues.

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

Florida Chief of Staff Stephen MacNamara noted that the Office of Open Government has struggled to keep up with the demand for staff email.

“It will cut down the work of the staff,” MacNamara said.

“We’re getting four times the requests (former Governor) Charlie Crist was getting when he was here, with the same-sized staff. They’re just working their tails off,” he said of his staff.

Sunburst will be expanded to include other agencies within the executive branch, Scott said.

Letters that Scott sends out through more traditional routes may also be added to the site, MacNamara said.



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