Yes, they are. Virtually every consequential interaction you have with the government ends up as part of the public record. You don’t have to do that via email, and if email is convenient then having two email addresses is not that difficult. There are well–known exceptions, such as library borrowing records, which are exempt and have been since long before email addresses were invented.
No, you misunderstood. Perhaps I stated it poorly.
My statement is that every interaction with local government in the US generates a public record. This is true even when email is not involved. For example, let’s say that you have purchased a property. The deed is registered with a county government. The tax assessor decides how much property tax you will owe. They record whether you have actually paid that tax or not. All of these records are public information, and there is very little concession to privacy. In the US, there is no expectation of privacy around these records. Anyone in the US can look up these records for any property at all, and your name is there for all to see. The amount you paid for the property is there for all to see, and so on. Your phone number and email address would be there too, except for the fact that they don’t collect or store that information. They don’t need too, because they always do business with you by mail. These days you can also use their website to pay your property tax, or to look up information about a property you are interested in, but that is ancillary.
The same holds true for almost all other ways that you might interact with the government. Building permits and inspections are public records. Arrest warrants are open. Trial records. Water bills are public records, if the water is provided by a utility owned and operated by the government (varies from place to place). Drivers licensing is almost entirely open. Vehicle registration. Bids on providing goods and services to the government are only sealed for a short time; once the winning bidder is selected all of them become public records. All of this is business as usual in the US.
Finally, all of the official communications of government employees and elected officials, whether internal to a government department or not, are public records. That means that if you talk to a mayor, whether by phone or by email or by written letter, and the mayor is acting in an official capacity, then the entirety of your communication is a public record. That includes the type of communication, how it was delivered, your phone number, your email address, etc. All of it is to be recorded and made available to the public upon request.
Of course public records may contain information that is not public. When a member of the public requests a public record, such non–public information should be redacted from the copy that they receive. That includes things like credit card numbers and social–security numbers, but not necessarily phone numbers or email addresses. Especially not the phone numbers or email addresses of the parties to the communication. Maybe it’s different where you’re from, but here those are important parts of the public record. If you want to talk to the mayor but don’t want your email address to become part of the public record, then don’t talk to the mayor via email! Write a letter instead.
