Staffers "take whatever steps necessary" to find the deleted messages, sent in the last two days of the legislative session.
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published May 22, 2004
TALLAHASSEE - Dozens of e-mails deleted by House Speaker Johnnie Byrd's top aide after the end of the legislative session reappeared Friday after Byrd overruled his staff and demanded they be found.
After a weeklong electronic excavation, the House released a CD containing 74 e-mails sent to Byrd's chief of staff, P.K. Jameson, on the session's last two days.
The total is only a fraction of the 1,100 e-mails sent to Byrd those two days. The St. Petersburg Times requested the e-mails under Florida's public records law, but Jameson said she deleted hers, though she agreed some were public records.
One e-mail contains a draft of a proposal to extend the legislative session for two hours, until 2 a.m. Saturday, May 1. It was never acted upon, and the session adjourned shortly before midnight April 30.
Other messages reflect the frantic pace of lawmaking in the final 48 hours:
Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, e-mailed Jameson late Friday night, urging passage of a bill to require counties and cities to consider the effect zoning changes would have on military bases.
A House staffer told Jameson that Byrd's wife, Melane, wanted the bill passed. (It did.)
Another staff member told Jameson about "three important issues" Thursday, including Senate resistance to Byrd's position on board appointments to the Alzheimer's research center at the University of South Florida.
Jameson said she deleted the e-mails after forwarding them or seeing that others got the same message or concluding that they lacked long-term significance.
The House press office and a staff attorney declined the Times' request to retrieve them. But critics, including Attorney General Charlie Crist, Tallahassee area State Attorney Willie Meggs, incoming House Speaker Allan Bense and the First Amendment Foundation, all questioned Jameson's action.
Soon after Crist said he was exploring how to retrieve the e-mails, Byrd, a U.S. Senate candidate, issued a statement last Saturday, directing staffers "to take whatever steps necessary" to retrieve Jameson's mail messages.
The speaker's office said Friday the work took more than 50 hours. The House waived its usual procedure of charging for the time it took to fulfill the request.
"We are confident all of the e-mails were retrieved," said Byrd's spokesman, Tom Denham. He said there weren't more e-mails because Jameson spent most of those last two days talking directly to lawmakers and staff members.
