Some Sucette public records request documents not readable

Text messages from 2 council members pixelated, not legible

Working to get issue resolved

MANDEVILLE — Mandeville Daily is working with the City of Mandeville to resolve a technical issue with the electronic files containing Sucette Harbor-related text messages from two of the five City Council members.

Only the text messages from District I Councilwoman Rebecca Bush and District III Councilwoman Jill McGuire are not legible and appear “pixelated” as if they were compressed or reduced before or while sending. The other digital documents from Bush and McGuire are fine.

Mandeville Daily wants to be clear that we believe the issue was caused by human error and was not intentional. We feel we have a duty to be thorough and to keep the reader informed of the process. The City of Mandeville’s legal department insists the pixelated, low-resolution images are exactly how they received them from the two council members in question.

We tried printing the records in question on multiple computers and printers.

Below is a sample of one of the more readable messages. While it is possible to decipher certain groups of words or complete sentences here and there, one cannot do so with absolute certainty and the messages cannot be read as one would expect.

What’s more, the recipient/sender’s names or phone numbers are completely unreadable as well as the date and time stamps, which are all necessary to add any form of context or to put them in chronological order. Without this information, they’re meaningless.

This is an example of a text message from McGuire. Her text messages are not legible at all.

Mandeville Daily was able to decipher some of Bush’s exchanges and place them in context, but with most of her texts we do not know the dates or whom they are with.

The text messages from the other three council members are good and have clearly readable names and date and time stamps.

Mandeville Daily is in the process of putting those text messages in chronological order as well as adding context to everything and everyone mentioned or participating in the message threads. It is an involved process, one we feel obligated to complete before publishing the information.

We would like to complete that process with Bush and McGuire’s text messages too.

The five council members turned over the following numbers of text messages (by screens):

Council Member	Texts	Status
Jason Zuckerman	43	OK
Rick Danielson	68	OK
Rebecca Bush	127	(mostly unreadable)
Skelly Kreller	171	OK
Jill McGuire	61	(all unreadable)

When completed, we will publish a cross-referenced timeline of events, allowing the reader to inspect all text messages in context.

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