Councillor Requests City Email Addresses for All Board and Commission Members

By Adam Swift

Providing each city board and commission member with a city of Revere email account will come with a cost, but City Councilor-at-Large Anthony Zambuto said it is a cost the city might have to pay.

At last week’s council meeting, Zambuto filed a motion asking that Acting Mayor Patrick Keefe request the IT director to issue revere.org email addresses to all city employees, including each and every board and commission member. All city employees already have a revere.org email account, said IT Director Jorge Pazos.

Pazos said each additional email account added by the city costs over $200 per year.

“We went through this exercise back in February looking at all of the different board and commission memberships to figure out what that number was,” said Pazos. “So it’s about $232 per year per person. That covers licensing, cybersecurity and phishing, and all of those things that we provide as part of our wraparound services.”

Depending on how many board and commission members would be considered eligible for an email account, Pazos said the cost gets up to about $50,000 per year.

“That’s currently not in the IT budget, so we would have to figure out the funding portion of that,” he said.

Zambuto said it was his understanding that the city would eventually have to provide municipal email accounts for board and commission members to be in compliance with state law.

“Let’s just go forward and do it,” said Zambuto. “We’ll have to find the money because we have to be in compliance.”

Pazos noted that the city does provide email addresses for all board and commission members of boards that have legislative responsibilities.

“But there is quite a bit of sprawl,” he said. “It would be helpful if you put some parameters around this to figure out whether these types of boards and commissions actually qualify for getting an email address  through the city, or if we just zero in on specific groups.”

Zambuto said it was his understanding that there should be email addresses for any board or commission acting in accordance with the city government.

“I understand that it comes with a cost, but so do a lot of things,” said Zambuto.