Another useless Township Committee resolution.

During its last meeting, the Township Committee unanimously approved a resolution supposedly protecting residents, who give their e-mail addresses to township entities, from political email communications. While the Committee can certainly prohibit township controlled entities from disclosing emails they collect, the Township has no power over the use of email addresses by non-township related entities already in possession of such email addresses. Like political phone calls, which are exempt from "Do Not Call" regulations, political emails don't meet the "commercial email" definition of SPAM and therefore are not illegal.

In addition, Mayor Ken Short continues to demonstrate incompetence if, as the Daily Record reports, he thinks "once residents are on a distribution list, they have access to all the other e-mail addresses on that list". WRONG! Most widely distributed emails (like the one I sent today) are almost always sent "blind carbon copy" (BCC) to avoid giving the competition a targeted means to provide a response.

A bit of advice for my former colleagues: instead of providing self serving, "knee jerk" reactions to "challenged residents" who can't figure out how to use the "unsubscribe" link located at the bottom of most mass distributed emails, the Township Committee might want to focus its energy on ways to avoid increasing our taxes by a factor exceeding nine times the current rate of inflation.