Fort Worth Mayor Moncrief has suspiciously little e-mail contact with Chesapeake Energy

by Steve Smith of of West and Clear

Back in February, I got a burr in my saddle. Right after Mayor Mike Moncrief decided to put the fix in on the Gas Drilling Task Force, stack the deck heavily in favor of the industry and keep any meaningful discussion about injection wells out the public eye, I got a little curious.

What’s going on here? How does the Mayor take an issue that the public is keenly interested in and completely cut the public out of the process?

So, on Feb. 26, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the City of Fort Worth to find out why. I asked the City to supply all emails between the Mayor and anyone affiliated with Chesapeake Energy between that day and Jan. 1, 2007. I also asked for email between the Mayor and any city department on the topic of injection wells over the same period.

I can’t possibly cover everything that I gleaned from the entire process in one post, so I’m just going to focus on the emails between the Mayor and Chesapeake Energy over that period.

My assumption going in to this process would be that there would be a heavy volume of email. After all, this is the same period of time when the Trinity Trees incident went down. I expected some interesting stuff.

And how many emails did I get between Mikey and Chesapeake mouthpiece Julie Wilson, CEO Aubrey McClendon or anyone else at Chesapeake Energy?

The answer: one email.

Really.

One email. Here it is:

Honestly, I wish I had friends who I only emailed once a year and ask to drop a grand or two on a going-away party for my pal, the outgoing city manager. Although I think Mikey is pretty squishy on ethics when it comes to his friends in the gas drilling community, I’ve heard Mikey hit up a lot of people from the Chamber of Commerce crowd with emails like this.

No, I’m much more troubled to think that in 14 months there was only one email exchange between Mayor Mike and Chesapeake. That’s why I asked a few people I know at City Hall about the City’s email policy, and they told me that there is a strict 100MB limit on city email boxes. “That doesn’t take long to fill up once you get a couple of PowerPoint presentations,” one person said.

When you get close to that limit? Delete. Delete. Delete.

So even though city code has very strict guidelines about destruction of city records, in practice, email is essentially exempt from the code. Apparently, everyone who works for the city is destroying public documents every day, and no one considers it that big a deal.

Were there more emails between Mikey and Chesapeake? No one will ever know. The fact is, according to the City of Fort Worth, Mike and Julie swapped one email over a 14-month period.

Maybe he and Julie exchange long, thoughtful missives written with quill and parchment like John and Abigail Adams. Maybe they sit on a park bench and exchange elaborately coded messages like something out of a John le Carre novel. Maybe they use the phone, semaphore or carrier pigeon.

I just think it’s curious that a very hands-on government official with a well-known love for the energy industry would only exchange one email in 14 months with the very visible spokesperson for the most high-profile energy company in the city.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

If you’d like to read an interesting take on email as a public document, take a look at this Dallas Morning News story. I’ve got more to write about. Stay tuned.

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