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Aspen Councilman apologizes for not reading nearly 8,000 emails

After four years in office, Aspen City Councilman Art Daily who is running for another term, is finally receiving emails that are being delivered to his government account.

On Monday, the city of Aspen’s IT department began forwarding Daily’s emails to his private business account at the law firm, Holland & Hart, LLP The move is in response to the revelation that Daily has never looked at his City of Aspen email account.

Aspen Public Radio has learned through an open records request that Daily has nearly 8,000 unread emails in his City of Aspen account. City Clerk Linda Manning said a good portion of the emails were junk but she did acknowledge that some were directly from citizens. She also said some of them were likely sent to other city email addresses and ended up in council packets as part of the public record.

The issue came up last week during an election debate when Daily’s opponent, Ward Hauenstein, asked why Daily never responded to his emails. Hauenstein was using the address listed on the city’s web page — art.daily@cityofaspen.com. Daily responded by saying he assumed people knew he received emails at his law firm.

Daily said on Monday that he thought the city had been forwarding the the government emails to his law firm account — adaily@hollandhart.com.

“There are a few people out there who probably wished that their emails to me had come through and they didn’t," Daily said. "I’m sorry about that and I wished that they had come through too. It certainly wasn’t anything intentional. I don’t know where I would have benefited from it but ultimately you end up like this with your hat in hand going ‘uh that wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done.'”

Daily said he’s glad that the matter is being cleaned up and it serves as a lesson for other elected officials as well.

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