Lewiston’s IT director told the City Council on Tuesday that a configuration problem with nested distribution groups caused some public‑comment emails to fail to reach councilors and staff.

IT Director Craig Star and Systems Administrator Maurice Pelletier said investigators found a stacked distribution‑group setup in the cloud email system that prevented messages routed to a nested group from reaching all intended recipients. IT deleted and rebuilt the groups with individual user addresses, began systematic testing and has been manually releasing and delivering messages that were delayed during the outage.

Councilors recounted constituents who believed their comments had not been received; one member said an email on the police department’s draft AI camera policy was not received until it was re‑sent. IT said it now checks the public‑comment mailbox daily at 8 a.m. and will continue testing until confident delivery is reliable. Staff confirmed any undelivered public‑comment mails discovered during the outage have been forwarded to the council.

Public commenters suggested posting public‑comment emails on the city website to improve transparency and provide evidence that messages were received. Councilors asked IT to continue tests and to provide assurance the issue was resolved; IT agreed to send further test messages and requested councillors to reply so testing data is complete.