NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio recently told reporters that email correspondence between him and his top political advisors, who he dubbed "agents of the city," should remain hidden from the public.
READ MORE: De Blasio: Emails With 'Agents of the City' Should Be Hidden From Public
This is not the first time a New York City mayor has tried to keep emails private, and out of reach of the state's Freedom of Information Law.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg used an email from his company, Bloomberg LP, as a private way to discuss city business, as DNAinfo New York reported back in 2013.
READ MORE: Mayor and Deputy Used Private Email Addresses for City Business
“It’s an end run around public access to public documents,” civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel said back then.
Like most government employees, Bloomberg and his staff had City Hall-issued email accounts. Under state law, the public has the right to see copies of those emails.
Bloomberg spokesman Marc LaVorgna acknowledged at the time that Bloomberg and top aides had private accounts.
“Yes, people have personal email accounts. It’s no different than everyone with a Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account,” he said. LaVorgna didn’t specify whether the mayor and his staff conducted city business on these accounts.
DNAinfo managed to get a few emails from the mayor's personal Bloomberg.net address when it made a Freedom of Information Law request for correspondences between him and then-Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
The emails were mostly Bloomberg forwarding messages he received from pals complaining about newly installed Citi Bike docking stations. One of the messages forwarded along was from the mayor's pal who was miffed that a station was placed outside his $2 million Chelsea townhouse.
READ MORE: Bloomberg's Pals Begged Him to Help Move 'Hideous' Citi Bikes, Emails Show
Bloomberg's team also had a plan to delete thousands of emails from various city agencies, rather than preserving them as city records.
READ MORE: With 3 Months Left, Bloomberg Admin Has No Plan to Save Many City Emails
Later, DNAinfo learned that the Bloomberg administration had a crafted a plan in 2012 to automatically delete emails from rank-and-file workers at 14 agencies.
A de Blasio spokeswoman told DNAinfo that that plan was ultimately scrapped.
READ MORE: Bloomberg Administration Had Plan to Delete City Emails
But it turned out that since 2009 the city's Law Department had been deleting emails from its workers' inboxes and sent folders after 90 days.
After DNAinfo learned through sources that the Law Department had an auto-delete policy in place, de Blasio spokeswoman Christina Levin said that City Hall's previous response was specifically in regard to the 2012 policy.
She said the Law Department — which represents city agencies, workers and elected officials in civil litigation — implemented the policy in 2009 to increase efficiency and cut costs.
READ MORE: City Law Department Automatically Deletes Workers' Emails After 90 Days
