Sunburst, the state’s email transparency program, is still not providing the level of transparency that was initially promised by Gov. Rick Scott’s office. (Photo via flgov.com)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
It has been almost two years since Gov. Rick Scott’s office launched Sunburst, an online database of emails aimed at creating transparency.
However, the program, which publishes inter-office emails to a website accessible to anyone, has fallen short of providing real transparency, according to recent reporting from The Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald.
Several months after Sunburst was launched, open government advocates complained that it was not serving its main purpose, mostly because the most essential people in the governor’s office rarely use email.
According to reporting by the Times/Herald last November,
Workers at state agencies also are wary of using email to alert Scott’s inner circle (and consequently the media) to impending trouble.
Anyone can access the email of Scott and his top aides at www.flgov.com/sunburst. But if Sunburst were designed to end secrecy in state government, it hasn’t.
“It’s been a disappointment, to say the least,” said Barbara Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation, who had high hopes because the search for email from Scott’s office had been costly and time-consuming.
“The manipulation of content and lack of substantive communications — there’s simply not much there of any real value to the public,” Petersen said.
Instead of communicating via email, staffers including like Adam Hollingsworth, Scott’s chief of staff, use face-to-face communications and meetings, which makes email transparency pointless.
When Sunburst was first launched early last year, Scott also promised to include emails from other government agencies under his control in the database. That still has not happened.
And as the Times/Herald reported this week, the governor’s office still “struggles to meet Scott’s own timetable for making messages available.”
Not all emails are online within seven days, as Scott said they would be 15 months ago. In addition, Scott’s stated goal of making many emails available within 24 hours has met with uneven results, giving Sunburst a perpetually cloudy image.
“Project Sunburst had the potential to be recognized globally as a government transparency innovation,” says Dan Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida, the independent government watchdog group. “The basic promises of the project have not been kept.”
Even Scott’s top adviser, Chief of Staff Adam Hollingsworth, concedes that Sunburst discourages people from sending emails for fear they will be on public display.
“It actually may have a dampening effect on people’s desire to send communications to the office,” he said.
In the time that state agencies have been exempt from Sunburst, three agency heads Scott appointed resigned amid controversy.
This past July, David Wilkins, the head of the Department of Children and Families, resigned. His departure followed controversy surrounding the deaths of multiple children who were under the agency’s watch.
Just a few weeks after, Education Commissioner Tony Bennett resigned after the Associated Press reported he had changed his grading policies when he was head of schools in Indiana to accommodate a charter school founded by a wealthy political donor.
And earlier this month, Jim Crochet, Florida’s long-term care ombudsman, turned in his resignation papers in the midst of an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing. Crochet headed a program meant to protect elderly people placed in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and was heavily criticized for protecting the interests of the companies he was tasked with regulating.