But Their Emails: Some Metro Council Members Don’t Read Them

First, Scoop: Nashville reported that Metro Councilmember Ed Kindall had more than 9,000 unread emails. A couple of days later, The Tennessean followed up with a version of its own.

Let’s not let this content train stop: The Scene can now report that lots of Metro Council members have thousands of unread emails. (The Tennessean apparently filed a request for the email records. Metro Legal shared the data with Council members, and one of the Council members shared it with us.)

In the past six months, for example, District 5 Councilmember Scott Davis has left 5,489 emails unread out of 6,554 received. We just sent him another one asking for comment, but true to form, it remains unanswered.

(Update: Davis responded to say that he does read his emails. "Metro IT Services’ 'unread email' function, emails marked as 'unread' do not distinguish opened emails that are subsequently marked 'unread' (as a bookmark of sorts)," he wrote.)

Davette Blalock, the District 27 representative, had 5,197 unread emails out of 5,991 emails received. As Metro Council attorney Mike Jameson noted in his note to the whole Council about the data release, some Council members have messages sent to their government accounts forwarded to an external account. This reporter has received a prompt response from Blalock herself from such a private account.

Several Council members keep a tidy inbox: Steve Glover, Sheri Weiner, Sharon Hurt, Robert Swope, Nancy VanReece, Mike Freeman, Mary Carolyn Roberts, Jeff Syracuse, Fabian Bedne, Colby Sledge, Brett Withers and Bob Mendes each have an unread total in the single digits (though Jameson noted that some of these low numbers could be the result of forwarding to private accounts).

Kindall, in responding to both Scoop: Nashville and The Tennessean, said the vast majority of emails were the sort of form “for/against” messages sent to all 40 members through a catchall email address. It’s a defense echoed by others on the Council.

“I don't open every one of those emails because it's from people not from my district or an unrelated issue," Kindall told The Tennessean, which also reported that a group of some 50 Kindall constituents had written to Vice Mayor Jim Shulman to complain about their representative’s inattentiveness. "I go on to primarily looking for my district and sometimes you might have to go through 200 to 300 to find one. If I read every one of them, I would be reading all day. I wouldn't be able to do anything else."

In the spirit of transparency, we’ll publish our own unread email totals:

• Steven Hale: 0
• Amanda Haggard: 8
• Elizabeth Jones: 12
• Stephen Elliott: 66
• Kara Hartnett: 77
• Nancy Floyd: 356
• D. Patrick Rodgers: 5,592
• Geert De Lombaerde: 6,443
• Stephen Trageser: 37,780

Now, we call on The Tennessean and Scoop: Nashville to release their own unread email totals, and for WPLN to do the next story on Metro Council emails.