That’s right, you may not have heard of it before, but today is Sunshine Sunday – the first day of an entire week where media professionals are devoted to focusing on public records access laws which are called the Sunshine Laws here in Florida.

Our very own Mayor Peyton will be celebrating Sunshine Sunday this year by implementing brand new restrictions on access to public emails. By directive of his ased spam! When it comes to access public emails, it is necessary to restrict the 800,000 people in Duval County to one computer in the mayor’s office (open 8-5 on weekdays), because of a recent increase in spam. This comes via Susie Wiles’ (mayor’s spokeswoman) latest interview with NPR (89.9fm) at www.wjct.org. This should be available on their site by Tuesday, 3/14/06.

Up until the last couple of days, Peyton & gang still had not quite settled on an exact reason to offer for restricting this access. He and his staffers had come up with a wide variety of reasons. It appeared the answer you got depended upon who you asked and where the moon was positioned in the sky at that exact moment. Let’s list a few: “technology issues”, “viruses”, “increased email activity”, “problems sweeping the emails up to the site” & “increased spam”. All of this -- even though the IT Director for the city, Dave Lauer, says he knew of no “technological issues with the [access] site” and that “he can’t say the city is receiving more spam because of the increase in the web site’s visitors”.

So this is where they are hanging their hat? Well good. Because that is an issue that can easily be investigated and very easily proven as true or false. And that is exactly what we are doing. Below you will the find public records request that we have submitted to Susie Wiles & Dave Lauer. We must find out exactly how much of an increase in spam we have been responsible for (“much, much more” according to Wiles’ aforementioned interview with NPR).

Looking at the records request below, you may wonder why we are asking for the actual spam emails themselves. Well, in Wiles’ interview with NPR, she mentioned that during the recent explosion in spam emails there have been quite a few that have been “inappropriate” in nature. She also hinted that the public accessing the site may have been responsible for these particular emails. We’d like to see if these “inappropriate” emails are higher in count than before the public actually started using the public access site.

We speculate the adminstration is doing one of two things: 1) burning the midnight oil to create spam emails and post-date them or 2) delaying as long as possible from sending us the report. We could be wrong, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

And again, Happy Sunshine Sunday!