An ongoing dispute over accessing McComb officials’ phone and email records continued in Tuesday’s city board work session.
In question are the phone and email records of Mayor Whitney Rawlings, which two selectmen suggested would show improper discussions between the mayor and other members of the board prior to the April 2015 dismissal of former city administrator Quordiniah Lockley.
The board, in a tie vote broken by the mayor, fired Lockley after he objected to a proposal to hire an auditor to review financial controls in the wake of an embezzlement case in the city court system.
Selectmen Albert Eubanks and Ronnie Brock repeatedly pressed for access to the mayor’s records, producing a letter from Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s office supporting their request. The letter cited a state public records law covering all of an elected official’s texts and emails.
Board attorney Wayne Dowdy responded that he had consulted with the Mississippi Ethics Commission and received an advisory opinion from them, and determined that certain exemptions to the open records law apply in this case.
Specifically, Dowdy said purely personal texts and emails “are not subject to production,” and “nobody is entitled to (the mayor’s) private records under any circumstance.”
Eubanks made the records request last year before he won a Feb. 23 special election to win the Ward 3 seat.
Eubanks is trying to prove whether Rawlings and selectmen Tommy McKenzie, Ted Tullos and Michael Cameron met privately outside of city board meetings to plot Lockley’s termination.
Public meetings laws state that any gathering of board members that constitutes a quorum is essentially a public meeting, and Eubanks asserts that a meeting outside of the board room to plan to fire Lockley would have been inappropriate.
At the heart of the disagreement is who should assess the emails for their relevance to city business. Brock, in a heated exchange with Dowdy, asserted, “I have just as much right as you” to decide whether communications relate to city business.
Eubanks expressed doubt that out of several thousand of Mayor Rawlings’ emails, only a few sentences were deemed by Dowdy to be official business. The mayor “will be derelict in his duty if that was the only time he talked about city business,” Eubanks said.
Eubanks, during his own exchange with Dowdy, said he would release all of his own emails pertaining to city business every 30 days, specifying later that such a release would begin 30 days after his March 1 swearing-in.
It’s unclear whether anything new will come out of the discussion over the mayor’s phone records. The board didn’t vote on the issue Tuesday since it was in a work session, and there was no indication from the mayor that the board will revisit the matter.
In response to the previous accusation by Eubanks that McKenzie had participated in a meeting with Tullos and Cameron at Cameron’s home prior to Lockley’s termination, McKenzie asked Eubanks to supply proof.
Eubanks referred to a photo showing Tullos’ and McKenzie’s vehicles parked at Cameron’s home before the Lockley firing. McKenzie asked to see the photo with a time stamp attached.
McKenzie also invited Eubanks and Brock to come to his office and examine his own emails, saying, “You’re not going to find anything.”
Asked after the meeting if they would accept McKenzie’s invitation, Brock said he would not go to McKenzie’s office, and that if McKenzie wanted to make his records available he should produce them.
But Eubanks added, “We don’t know where it might lead. ... It may be a step that we have to do.”
