Committee tables bill that would let legislators use alternate email addresses for official business

Senate Bill 506, which would have permitted legislators to use a non-mt.gov email address for legislative correspondence while placing recordkeeping responsibility on the legislator, was tabled by the Senate Legislative Committee during executive action.

Sponsor Senator Shane Morigeau said the bill would let “legislators choose a different email address than his primary, legislative-provided email address” and would make clear that the legislator bears responsibility for retention and public records compliance.

Legislative IT staff told the committee the change would introduce “unintended consequences” and potential security risks. Systems manager Sky Foster and CIO Troyer said the branch’s enterprise systems and security posture are built around official mt.gov accounts and that automatic forwarding or external accounts could allow spoofing or domain blacklisting that would affect the entire legislative domain.

“It is our security policy, and it's actually the state's security policy not to allow that,” an IT witness said, explaining that automatic forwarding and external accounts could “lead to a place where no one in the branch could be able to email out” if the domain were blacklisted.

Committee members also noted practical benefits of the official accounts, including automatic archiving that helps satisfy public-records requests. Several senators said they sympathized with the sponsor’s desire to consolidate messages but concluded the security and administrative costs outweighed the benefit.

A motion to pass SB 506 was made in executive action, but a substitute motion to table the bill passed on a voice vote; the committee recorded that Senator Zolnikov was “aye by proxy.” The sponsor said he would continue discussions but the bill will not advance at this time.