WHQR's Sunday Edition is a free weekly newsletter delivered every Sunday morning. You can sign up for Sunday Edition here.
A decade ago, when I first started at Port City Daily, I struggled a bit to find my footing when it came to local government. I read past reporting, scrolled through meeting minutes, watched agenda briefings — and all that helped, but I felt like I was missing something. I was seeing polished presentations and hearing elected officials weigh in on discussions that had obviously been percolating at the staff level, under the radar.
I was seeing the end results, but not the process.
Then I discovered the existence of public email terminals — three of them, actually, at the City of Wilmington, the Town of Carolina Beach, and New Hanover County.
These let you read through emails from staff, or at least department heads, top administrators, and elected officials. Not everything was on there, and emails marked ‘protected’ or ‘confidential’ would be kept off the server. But, in general, you could see what was going on, like what residents were saying to officials and what kind of responses they got. You could watch as draft versions of projects got debated, and see where problems or opportunities might be emerging, long before they were discussed in a public meeting.
I know, I know, spending an afternoon reading through government emails might sound boring. Sometimes it was. Sometimes you’d end up with a chain of two or three dozen emails discussing a misfiled receipt for a tank of gas.
But sometimes you’d learn that a department head was drunk on the job, that the U.S. government was peeved at a town’s dredging project, that a major gang investigation was underway, or that the city was planning on buying the tallest office building in the region.
Some of these stories were simply scandalous, but others forced public conversations on important issues that would have been minimized or kept quiet entirely.
Importantly, the email terminal allowed you to check in on things in almost real time. Every local government has its own system — and its own pace — for responding to public records requests for emails and other documents, but it’s rare that you’d get something faster than you could from the terminal.
So, for years, I made visiting these terminals part of my weekly routine. In Carolina Beach, you could walk right up to the terminal. Likewise, in the old county building, there was a room with several terminals right by the fish tank (where, as a bonus, you could keep an eye on Congressman David Rouzer’s office if you needed a quote from him or a staffer).
The City of Wilmington’s terminal was squirreled away in the basement of Thalian Hall, but all it took was a quick email to the comms department, or sometimes just a request to office staff, and you could duck in and use it. It was kind of fun, because you’d be sitting within earshot of several offices, and you’d hear all manner of scuttlebutt, but you’d also get to talk to staffers and deputy managers, which was genuinely helpful.
Those were the good old days.
***
Eventually, the city moved its terminal under the Clerk’s office and tightened things up just a little. It was still relatively easy to email City Clerk Penny Spicer-Sidbury and schedule an appointment, but it would sometimes be a week or two out. That was fine for the occasional check-in, but less than ideal if there was a developing story that you wanted to dig into.
At this point, I’d moved to WHQR, taking on more editorial responsibility and doing less of my own reporting, but I didn’t want to give up on the terminal. Thankfully, I was able to set up a standing appointment, which made things easy for everyone. I'd basically take a shopping list from my colleagues, issues and items I would look for and keep tabs on.
In the summer of 2022, I noticed that the city had disabled the ability to view attachments. If I recall, I was told this was an IT security issue – a mild annoyance, especially since the county’s terminal didn’t seem to have the same problem – but not the end of the world, especially since you could still open your own web-based email account and send yourself those attachments.
That was, for example, how we learned the city was considering a $68-million purchase of the Thermo Fisher building (although, initially, only because a staff member mispelled ‘protected’).
Eventually, if I recall correctly, the city also shut off the ability to access the web from the email terminal (basically meaning you couldn’t send yourself documents or cut and paste emails). Again, this was something that was easy to do on the county terminal.
It felt, if I’m honest, like the terminal’s functionality was being ratcheted down. Other journalists I’ve known over the years felt the same.
I will admit, I ruined the standing appointment arrangement because, as my schedule got busier, I missed several visits without warning the Clerk, which was rude on my part. As Spicer-Sidbury essentially noted, it was also rude to other people who might be waiting for the terminal and could have taken my unused slot — a fair point.
To be clear, we weren’t blacklisted or anything Draconian like that, but we did have to go back to scheduling visits on a case-by-case, first-come-first-served basis.
***
Last year, terminal access was — very understandably — disrupted while the Clerk’s office moved into the new Skyline Center City Hall.
At the time, my colleague Kelly Kenoyer was trying to get an appointment. She was told that there were three people ahead of her. In early May, when the terminal was back up and running, she was offered a slot about two weeks out.
We asked how many appointments were available per week, since it seemed scheduling three people would not take that long. After some terse back and forth, and looping in City Council members, we came to a détente, or something like it.
Spicer-Sidbury answered our question, telling us that her office had set aside two days a week (Wednesdays and Thursdays), and could book up to two people per day, depending on how long they needed the terminal. She noted that the same space was also utilized by residents who wanted to do “research,” which could delay appointment availability. Spicer-Sidbury noted that journalists were not the only ones using the terminal, and made it clear that she thought we were complaining unfairly, writing, “My staff is very accommodating and is forever listening to [WHQR's] complaints and questions.” For the record, I disagreed and thought our questions had been fair and pertinent.
But, at the same time, Spicer-Sidbury also noted that the Clerk’s office was “working with our I.T. department on setting up a terminal in our lobby here at 929 North Front Street [the Skyline Center]. However, that is work in progress.” I’d heard from some city councilmembers that they’d encouraged this idea, akin to what had been done at both the old and new county government center.
In the end, we told the city we felt their policies on accessing the terminal had “become inflexible and unwieldy,” but noted that we were very happy to hear about setting up a terminal in the lobby.
That, however, never happened.
***
In February, the Town of Carolina Beach announced that nearly half a million dollars had been stolen in a pair of cyberattacks, which ultimately led the town to discontinue its public terminal after 12 years, backed by the recommendation of the town’s IT staff, as well as a National Guard cybersecurity audit.
Not long after, Wilmington announced it was temporarily taking the terminal offline as part of a “proactive security review” prompted by the attacks on Carolina Beach and other local governments (although some incidents, like the one that fleeced over $650,000 from Pender County, reportedly didn’t involve sophisticated hacking, just good ol’ fashioned scamming).
“Recent events have shown that public-facing email terminals can create access points that increase risk for residents, employees, and City operations. The City is proactively using this opportunity to evaluate public-facing systems that provide access to records and communications, particularly where sensitive information could be exposed or misused,” the city announced, saying an update was expected by the end of March.
Later, the city quietly discontinued the terminal, which we discovered in early May when we checked to see if it was still out of commission.
On May 4, City Manager Becky Hawke told us the city had been “unable to resolve the security concerns associated with the previous media mailbox/email terminal, so it has been permanently suspended.”
Hawke said because of that, and a desire to improve responsiveness to public records, the city would transition to an online portal called NextRequest. She said the city would put out a press release when the new portal went live, which was expected “in the next few weeks.” (No word on it, yet.)
***
It struck us as a conspicuous contrast that, though Carolina Beach and the city were removing their terminals, New Hanover County was not. While the county also reportedly underwent an IT review by a National Guard cybersecurity team in March, it has no intention of removing its terminal, according to Chief Communications Officer Josh Smith.
Asked how the county managed cybersecurity risk, Smith said, “It is a read-only archive, separated from the county's internal systems, and it is actively managed under a county policy designed to protect confidential information while preserving access for the press and public. As with any county system, IT may add standard security measures over time, none of which would deny public access.”
He added, “The county's media terminal isn't going anywhere.”
We don’t cover Carolina Beach closely enough to die on the hill of their email terminal. But when it came to the city, which is a core part of our reporting, it seemed important to press the issue.
So, we asked the city if they’d consulted with the county. After all, if the county could manage this, why couldn’t they?
We also noted that, at present, it can take the city a considerable amount of time to process public records requests. That’s not to disparage Spicer-Sidbury, but the record showed we’d routinely waited weeks or even months for requests; Hawke had indicated the city wanted to improve that response time. Surely, we said, a public terminal might alleviate some of the backlog and workload for the Clerk’s office that was causing those delays.
“I can’t speak to how the County handles its process, but the City’s security assessment concluded that the move to NextRequest is the best option to balance transparency and access with protecting against inadvertent release of confidential materials. This new platform should streamline the records request process and reduce lengthy wait times while also making certain information more easily accessible to the public,” a city spokesperson told us.
We asked if that referred to things like the misspelling of the word “protected,” which inadvertently let the Thermo Fisher cat out of the bag, but the city said no. The goal, a spokesperson said, was to “protect sensitive communications (which may include personally identifiable information) and reduce cybersecurity risks.”
The city conducted both an in-house assessment and consulted a third-party vendor, Arctic Wolf, which “confirmed concerns internal staff have had for years about the vulnerabilities associated with having a mailbox available to the public,” according to the spokesperson.
***
There are very few things journalists can openly have a strong opinion about. Transparency is one of them.
“That’s the one thing you can be an advocate for, and an asshole about,” a colleague told me years ago, advice that obviously resonated and stuck with me.
Now, I do try to avoid being the latter (though I have my moments, I’m aware), but I’m staunchly and unapologetically the former. If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you’ve probably gleaned that.
So you won’t be surprised to hear what I think about the long, slow diminishment of the city’s public terminal, and its ultimate demise.
Certainly, I hope that the NextRequest system helps the city turn over emails and other documents to the press — and the public — more quickly than it currently does. State law requires governments to turn over these public records “as promptly as possible.” Journalists have long been frustrated by how open to interpretation that is, but I’ll say our newsroom has felt on more than one occasion that the city has pushed the charitable limits of the admittedly loose definition. Again, I’ve had many conversations with other reporters and editors from local outlets over the years, and I know WHQR's newsroom is not the only ones who feel this way.
Maybe the city’s ability to comply with open records law is sluggish because they’re being bombarded by onerous requests, maybe they need more staff, maybe — as Hawke suggested — a technological update will help streamline things. Whatever the case may be, faster responses to requests made under state law would be a good thing.
I’ll also note that other local governments have apparently given their communications staff more leeway to produce documents without going through the official custodian of records (often a clerk position). New Hanover County, for example, also uses NextRequest. But at the same time, if there’s something that can be turned over quickly — a recent email, a slideshow presentation from a meeting, a document referenced in a public conversation — the county’s communication team will frequently send it to me directly without jumping through any procedural hoops (or portals). They have, at times, even preemptively sent me stuff for which they suspect I’m gonna ask.
The city has, historically, taken a stricter approach to public records, running everything through the Clerk’s office (at one point, this even included internal document sharing within the city). I respect that the city is its own entity, and is free to implement its own policies on public records. But if those policies are taxing the city’s ability to serve the public and be transparent, perhaps they are worth reviewing.
Again, on most things, it’s my job to explore the pros and cons, not advocate for policy decisions.
But I will make an exception here.
With all due respect, the city should try harder to address its security and confidentiality concerns, as the county has, and install a public terminal in the lobby of City Hall or another convenient and accessible public location. It would be in the best interest of the press, the public, and the goal — which I think we all believe is important — of transparency.
