Anchorage Daily News

WASILLA -- The Matanuska-Susitna Borough, as part of a court settlement, will soon hand over to a Wasilla-area man thousands of e-mails from borough officials.

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Some of Borough Manager John Duffy's messages will be missing, despite a $3,000 effort to locate them.

Penny Nixon, a frequent administration critic, could as soon as this week get most of what he asked for, which was the e-mail of a dozen borough officials over a monthlong period in 2005, Duffy said.

Nixon said he filed the request because of his suspicions that borough officials were acting unethically. E-mails by public officials on work computers are generally considered public documents.

Nixon will get some of Duffy's messages from that time period but only the ones that could be retrieved from other officials' computers, the manager said.

The remaining e-mail from Duffy's computer appears to have gotten lost in a computer system conversion the borough underwent in 2005, he said.

Both the borough's technology department and a New Hampshire computer firm hired for about $3,000 tried and failed to find the missing messages, Duffy said.

Firm officials told the borough the data might have become corrupted during the conversion, which is not common but can happen, and can affect only some computers, Duffy said.

Two other officials' e-mail requested by Nixon is also missing, but their absence has been less of an issue. Former Public Works Director Don Shiesl's account was deleted because he had left the borough, and land manager Steve Cypra appeared to have a practice of deleting his e-mail, borough officials said.

The e-mail was the subject of lawsuit between the borough and Nixon, who filed a public records request last year for the messages.

Nixon filed the suit after objecting to a borough request that he pay $5,000 upfront to cover the cost of retrieving and providing copies of the e-mail. In the settlement, Nixon agreed to pay $765 for the records.

He said in an e-mail Saturday he suspects a cover-up.

"It is very unlikely that both Mr. Duffy's hard drive data and the back up data are completely missing unless it is deliberate," he wrote.

In response, Duffy said he could only maintain the borough's innocence and said hiring the New Hampshire firm and providing his internal e-mails should speak to the borough's good-faith effort to get the messages to Nixon.

"From an outsider's viewpoint, I can understand that they think maybe something abnormal is afoot," he said. "All I can say is that there is not"

Reporter S.J. Komarnitsky can be reached at skomarnitsky@adn.com or 352-6714.