Historic Lafayette Park, Tallahassee, Florida

Public Records Statute Violated?

City Attorney's Office Illegally Removed Text From Emails Prior To Release?

September 9, 2008, 10:51PM: An email from Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Director Wayne Tedder to Assistant City Attorney Linda Hudson was sent quite late, the night before the critical vote by the Architectural Review Board to strip major property rights wholesale from nearly 500 owners in Lafayette Park. Her response, shortly before the meeting the next morning, explains how she sees the property rezoning taking place, laying out a plan to follow.

Does this email appear to have been censored?. Text has obviously been removed. The pink lines have been added to indicate where the content seems to imply additional material, which is no longer there. Key elements of Ms. Hudson's plan may be missing. Most of the elements of Mr. Tedder's discussion of code conflicts and questions have been apparently removed.

This is an email received in a Spring 2009 public records request. It was withheld for weeks by the City Attorney Office, due to being "possibly privileged".

It appears to have been substantially tampered with.

It also appears to be a significant piece of the puzzle in understanding how an illegal application could make it through the ARB and to the Planning Commission, with two separate substitutions of the applicants, a specially-concocted "Owner Awareness Statement" that put the lie to "Owner Awareness", and hundreds of pages of blank Historic Structure Forms.

It would be nice to have all of Mr. Tedder's thoughts in this email. Unfortunately, this is all we got.