Mayor Taylor Used City Staff to Secretly “Harvest” Resident Email Addresses, Then Solicited Campaign Donations

by P.D. Lesko

In March 2022, The Ann Arbor Independent filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain all emails sent in 2020 and 2021 to and from City staff to any email address at Hooper Hathaway, the law firm where the Mayor is a partner. The newspaper received over 4,000 pages of documents, including some duplicates. Among the public records were multiple emails between a City staff member who assists the Mayor and Taylor. Among the emails that staffer sent to both Taylor’s a2.gov and Hooper Hathaway email addresses, were thousands of private emails of Ann Arbor residents. The addresses had been secretly “harvested” by the City staffer, without the knowledge or permission of the residents, from communications between residents and their elected officials.

The use of public resources by an elected official for campaigning or fundraising purposes is a campaign finance violation. Harvesting email addresses, as is evidenced in the single-spaced pages of email addresses sent to Taylor’s work address by his assistant, violates the City of Ann Arbor’s Privacy Policy as it applies to the use of residents’ personal information. City Administrator Milton Dohoney was asked about the staffer’s involvement in handing over residents’ private emails to a third party. He did not reply to phone messages or emails. Likewise, new City Attorney Atlene Kaur did not respond to a phone message seeking a comment.

“I’ve looked at the materials released in response to The Ann Arbor Independent’s FOIA. It appears to me the Mayor may have violated section 57 of the Michigan Campaign Act, MCL169.257, said Jack Eaton, in a phone interview. Eaton, a Democrat, is a retired labor law attorney who served on City Council from 2013-2020. Eaton added: “It appears that a City staff member extracted these emails and forwarded them to the Mayor’s business email account. Using City staff in furtherance of a political campaign would be illegal.”

At the July 19, 2022 City Council meeting, Ward 2 Council member Kathy Griswold (D) asked whether she was free to use the email addresses harvested by a City staff member for Mayor Taylor and sent to Taylor’s work email address. The City Administrator sat mute as Griswold spoke, despite having been asked the same question by Griswold in private, as well as in multiple email and phone messages by The Ann Arbor Independent. In response to Griswold’s question, the City Attorney dissembled and said that she would have an answer for Griswold the following day. Griswold says the City Attorney did not provide the requested information.

Griswold had previously asked Kaur the same question in an email. The City Attorney sent a response in which she said she was investigating whether City staff had violated the FOIA statute in their handling of the newspaper’s FOIA request. Kaur did not reply to Griswold’s concerns that Taylor’s email address “harvesting” had amounted to an abuse of his elected office, or whether Taylor’s assistant (a City staffer) had violated the privacy of thousands of Ann Arbor residents, and that both Taylor and his assistant had repeatedly and illegally abused City resources.

“They won’t have an answer for me until after the primary election,” said Griswold when contacted by phone after the July 19 Council meeting. “That much is clear. I’m very disappointed in both Milton [Dohoney] and Atleen [Kaur]. The Mayor has no idea how to behave honestly.” Griswold is concerned that City staff who should be protecting the rights of citizens are, instead, openly colluding to protect Taylor.

In 2018, when Taylor last ran for re-election, the carcinogen 1,4 Dioxane was first detected in Barton Pond, the source of 80 percent of the City’s drinking water. However, former City Administrator Howard Lazarus hid this revelation from the public until after Taylor had safety navigated the Democratic primary election against then Ward 4 Council member Jack Eaton. Data released to the public by the City’s Department of Water and Sewerage between 2018 and 2021, show that the 1,4 Dioxane levels detected in Barton Pond have risen sharply since first being detected.

The Ann Arbor Independent contacted 500 of the several thousand individuals whose email addresses had been harvested by Mayor Taylor’s assistant and then emailed from a City of Ann Arbor email account to Taylor at his work email address. The newspaper asked whether the individuals had received unsolicited email newsletters from Mayor Taylor. Taylor’s email newsletters carry campaign finance paid for disclosures, meaning the communications are political rather than strictly informational communications from the City of Ann Arbor. The Mayor’s most recent email newsletters have also contained solicitations for donations.

In response to the A2Indy’s emails, recipients of Taylor’s email newsletters responded that they had indeed begun receiving Taylor’s email newsletters without ever having opted in to do so.

One resident whose email address appears among those harvested and turned over to Taylor in 2020 said in an email, “Yes, I used to receive the Mayor’s newsletter until I asked to unsubscribe. I never opted in.”

Another resident whose email appears among those harvested and turned over the Taylor responded that she might, “have submitted my email in the past. I have received some of his [Taylor’s] emails I believe all the way back when he was my Ward Three…City Council person. He initially was promoting transparency back when he was a City Council person and asking the community directly questions and that is why I believe I signed up for his email back then. Obviously since he became mayor that’s really changed a lot. I also have been part of the Ann Arbor absentee voter count board so my email was definitely submitted to City Hall.”

Ward 2 Council member Kathy Griswold wasn’t surprised when told a Freedom of Information Act request had turned up evidence that Ann Arbor’s Mayor worked with a City staff member to harvest thousands of resident emails, and then may have had the emails sent to his private email address in order to use those harvested email addresses for campaign and fundraising purposes.

“I have constituents who tell me they’ve received the Mayor’s ‘newsletters,’ campaign and fundraising emails and they have no clue how they ended up on his email list,” said Griswold. “Just another example of a mayor who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”

Eric Langheinrich is behind the anti-spam technology made available through Project Honey Pot. Langheinrich explains: “In the United States the CAN-SPAM Act regulates the sending of unsolicited commercial email messages. While CAN-SPAM has been criticized as generally weak on spammers, one area where it is clear is in the prohibition against harvesting. Specifically, the law defines every message sent to a harvested address as ‘spam’ and imposes potential liability on the sender. This is regardless of whether the sender complies with the law’s other requirements. In other words, including an opt-out link and following the Act’s notice regulations is not enough to spare bulk mailers sending to harvested addresses from liability.”

Taylor is currently being investigated for violations of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act, including allegations that he lied on the sworn Affidavit of Identity filed with his petition signatures submitted on April 14, 2022 for his re-election bid. He faces a bevy of other allegations of unethical, illegal and dishonest conduct while in office:

• Taylor has tried to sell public land all by himself, without a vote of the public or City Council (he was sued by then Ward 1 Council members Anne Bannister and Sumi Kailasapathy and stopped).
• Taylor tried to illegally “caption” a 2018 ballot question put to the public to vote to keep the Library Lot public land (he was sued and stopped). Anne Bannister, who is challenging Taylor for the Mayor’s office, voted in opposition to the illegal caption.
• For 14 years Taylor fought and voted against EPA involvement in the clean-up of the three-decades old 1,4 Dioxane Gelman Plume that has reached the city’s drinking water source in Barton Pond. On his campaign literature this summer, he claims that we need to “press the EPA to accelerate 1,4 dioxane monitoring and cleanup.”
• Taylor is presently being investigated by the Michigan Secretary of State Elections Bureau for multiple campaign finance violations that allegedly happened between 2018 and 2020.
• Public records obtained by The Ann Arbor Independent in 2022 revealed that over a period of years, Taylor has used city staff to secretly “harvest” resident email addresses. The public records showed lists containing thousands of residents’ private email addresses were sent in “copy and paste format” to Taylor’s a2.gov and Hooper Hathaway work email addresses. This was done without the residents’ knowledge or permission. The Michigan Secretary of State’s Elections Bureau is, once again, investigating Taylor.
• On April 14, 2022 Taylor signed an affidavit of identity when he filed to run for re-election. In that affidavit, Taylor swore his campaign finances were in order. Weeks after the filing deadline and after he signed the affidavit, Taylor submitted 11 amended campaign finance statements. In May 2022, the Washtenaw County Clerk was asked to remove Taylor from the ballot, based on the allegedly fraudulent affidavit and amended statements. The Michigan Secretary of State’s Elections Bureau is investigating. The Ann Arbor Independent filed a public records request to obtain the March 2022 letter from the Elections Bureau to Taylor about the violations and Taylor’s response in which he allegedly acknowledged the campaign finance violations.

A request for comment sent to Mayor Taylor’s campaign and his City of Ann Arbor email addresses went unanswered.