Mayor Kirk Watson, seen at a news conference in February, often uses his personal email to conduct city business.
“Some people communicate with me on non-City of Austin accounts and I sometimes use non-City accounts,” Watson said via the spokesperson.requiring city employees, including the mayor and council members, to use their city email addresses to do their jobs. The policy says that if employees must use a personal email address for work, they need to forward those emails to their public account.
That changed in 2019 with legislation authored by Watson himself. Senate Bill 944 makes clear that personal emails used by government officials to do their jobs cannot be kept secret.
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