Plant City Insider

On Monday, January 27th, 2025, we published an article detailing how we believed that there was a possible Florida Sunshine Law violation within the City of Plant City Government. Following the publishing of that article, the Plant City Clerk reached out to our team via email and gave an ample explanation of what the mix-up was.

According to the city clerk (who also provided documentation), our emails were categorized as spam and thus were sent into the spam folder. It is unknown why the emails were categorized as spam. It is also unknown why our (Plant City Insider) email provider was marking these emails as read/viewed when, according to the city clerk, that was not the case. The city clerk assured our team that the emails were not even known to exist until that morning when they saw the article posted online discussing it and then they subsequently looked into the situation with their IT department.

The city clerk further assured our team that going forward, our email has been added to the list of safe emails and provided us with a direct phone number to call if there is any issue (we typically do not call outside organizations or individuals to remain anonymous, this is partially why we did not call in the first place and only sent emails). Additionally, we would like to thank the city clerk who provided us with full and unrestricted access to the files we were requesting. The Plant City Insider Team would like to apologize to the city clerk’s office for this mix-up.

As a publication, we still are committed to holding all individuals, governments, and organizations accountable to all extents of the law. In this situation, it was a simple mix-up, this should not be looked at in a way that means our team will bend a knee anytime we face pushback. Our team will only ever use publishing or posting online as a means to gain information or relay to the public issues we face in times when we have exhausted all other methods we have available to us. From the evidence provided by the city clerk’s office, we have no reason to believe the city was purposefully trying to cover up information, as it all appeared to be legitimate.