Transparency News 4/10/14 – Virginia Coalition for Open Government

Thursday, April 10, 2014

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State and Local Stories

Suppose you’re a working parent with kids in school, and you wanted to review audio from the local school board meetings. Suppose those totaled 20.75 hours in all, and that they weren’t available online. Suppose the only time you were able to listen to them at the school system’s offices directly conflicted with your work schedule. You would probably request copies of the audio files, so you could peruse those at your leisure. Now take a wild guess about what the school system would charge you for those files under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. At least in the city of Radford, the answer isn’t at all speculative: It was $830. Viewed in the best light, the Radford school administration could use a refresher in FOIA. In their initial responses they misapplied the law in at least two different ways.
Dan Casey, Roanoke Times

In nearly 25 years, no presidential administration has missed “winning” a Muzzle Award, which is bestowed on institutions that trample citizens’ First Amendment rights. On Wednesday, Barack Obama joined former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush on the list of presidents whose administrations have been pilloried by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. State and local recipients included the North Carolina General Assembly’s Police Department — which arrested a reporter attempting to interview clergy members at a protest in the state Capitol — and the Kansas Board of Regents, which implemented a policy allowing the presidents of institutions to fire faculty members for “improper use of social media.”
Daily Progress

Some law school students send the Justice Department résumés and references. At the University of Virginia School of Law, one class is sending document requests and lawsuits. The students, along with professors and a university librarian, are tackling the contentious world of white-collar crime, challenging federal prosecutors to unseal settlements with big banks and corporations. In a matter of months, the classroom litigators at the law school’s First Amendment clinic filed their first lawsuit against the Justice Department and won the release of a secret settlement deal. Building on the test case, the clinicramped up its effort this week, filing a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain 30 other settlement deals that remain under wraps, a preliminary move that could foreshadow another lawsuit.
New York Times

When the General Assembly last locked itself into a budget impasse, coming within days of missing its July 1 budget deadline, then Gov. Tim Kaine worked quietly to line up emergency loans and order emergency spending to keep all the key functions of state government running, email records in the Library of Virginia show. It turned out there were plenty of those, all dictated by dozens of specific demands set out in the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions, as well as in a series of state and federal laws. The emails showed Kaine planned to blame the General Assembly for the crisis. That approach could produce a political windfall for Gov. Terry McAuliffe if the current impasse over the state budget and health care coverage continues beyond the July 1 deadline for a budget, said Quentin Kidd, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University.
Daily Press

Reacting to an investigative report published Sunday in The Virginian-Pilot about questionable financial maneuvers, Portsmouth School Board members will discuss the performance of Superintendent David Stuckwisch at Thursday's meeting. Until now, board members have repeatedly defended Stuckwisch – after explosive grand jury findings early last year and then after a series of financial mismanagement allegations from the city. At the meeting Thursday, board member Costella Williams said, "We're going to discuss the article, and we're going to discuss the performance of the superintendent."
Virginian-Pilot

A majority of the James City County Board of Supervisors backed House Republicans' stance on decoupling Medicaid expansion from state budget considerations when they voted Tuesday to support a resolution and letter to the governor taking sides. The resolution and letter were apparently drafted by Del. Brenda Pogge, R-Norge, and considered by the supervisors in recent weeks by email, according to comments the supervisors made in Tuesday night's general meeting. The resolution and letter were not released to the public in advance of the meeting, although it seems that the supervisors knew that the vote was going to favor backing Pogge.
Virginia Gazette

Attorneys in two cases between CNX Gas and landowners who are suing for millions of dollars in natural gas royalties will have to put their heads together in the next three weeks to figure out how to extract years worth of gas well data from CNX computers, a federal judge decided Wednesday. “I think there ought to be a way this can be done,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Pamela Meade Sargent said after hearing about 90 minutes worth of testimony on the CNX computer systems.
Herald Courier

National Stories

In another case of a jurist being unafraid to take notice of the news, a federal judge in Washington is gauging the legal fallout from the Senate Intelligence Committee's vote to seek declassification of parts of its report on Central Intelligence Agency interrogation practices during the Bush era. In a brief order Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the parties in a pair of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to advise him on Friday whether the Senate panel’s action changes the stance of the two cases. The government argued earlier that the interrogation report is not subject to FOIA because it remains a Senate document.
Politico

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and 18 other media organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s challenge to the National Security Letters program. The media brief argues that the non-disclosure provision on the National Security Letter statute is classic prior restraint on speech, and the Northern District of California’s failure to term it as such threatens an important protection on which journalists rely.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

The Pennsylvania sting investigation that caught at least five elected officials on tape accepting cash and gifts was far from dead and should not have been shut down. So said Claude Thomas, the sting's lead investigator, who spoke to The Inquirer on Tuesday about the long-running inquiry that was dropped after state Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane took office early last year. Kane has said she did so because the inquiry was poorly managed and possibly tainted by racial profiling. She also said that the case had been inactive for months before she arrived, and that other law enforcement agencies, including the Dauphin County District Attorney's Office, agreed with her that the case could not have been prosecuted successfully. Prosecutors who ran the sting counter that it was a by-the-book investigation that had snared elected officials and had the potential to capture more.
Governing

Two figures central to the New Jersey’s Legislature's investigation of the George Washington Bridge lane closings do not have to turn over records related to the scandal, a state judge ruled today, handing Democrats leading the inquiry a major defeat. In a thorough dissection of the arguments made by the committee leading the investigation, state Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson found no basis to force Bridget Anne Kelly, Gov. Chris Christie's former deputy chief of staff, and Bill Stepien, his two-time campaign manager, to comply with its subpoenas.
Newark Star-Ledger

The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans cannot shield private identifying information about two people who posted anonymous comments on its website about a corruption probe, a federal appeals court has ruled. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday said the newspaper must disclose the information to a federal magistrate judge, for in-chambers review, in the prosecution of a former city official. U.S. District Judge Mary Ann Vial Lemmon on Wednesday lifted a stay and gave The Times-Picayune until noon on Thursday to produce the information. The newspaper's lawyers filed an emergency request with the appeals court to temporarily block the trial judge's order.
National Law Journal

Editorials/Columns

The extraordinary prescience of the founders did not include the notion of an online world, where people from far reaches engage in free expression in a manner unparalleled and unimagined by all but a select few a generation ago. But the First Amendment surely provided for that development and others yet to come. Words mattered to James Madison and backers of the Bill of Rights, and it is especially telling that those amendments begin by setting limits on those with the authority to restrain the rest of us in the area that most precisely distinguishes us from all other creation: the ability to communicate complex thought. America’s fathers knew the strongest deterrent to tyranny was free expression.This is why the United States must retain its oversight of the Internet, a product of American ingenuity and a reflection of the greatness of the First Amendment vision.
Daily Progress

Something doesn't add up in the finances of Portsmouth Public Schools. Given the people and competing interests involved, it will take an investigation independent of the School Board and the City Council to figure out what's wrong.
Virginian-Pilot

The budget amendment required that the Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission meet bimonthly, beginning last June, and through the end of 2013, it did meet. Despite all of the rhetoric from the General Assembly this year, MIRC did not hold a single meeting in 2014 until Monday. In the interim, a war of words has flooded the commonwealth's newspapers as supporters and opponents have taken the opportunity to have their positions heard. The MIRC has shirked its duty, and those who say "let the commission do its job" are well aware of it. But the fact that it was included in the budget makes the cries of passing a "clean budget" ring hollow. MIRC isn't the only reason, though.
Vivian Paige, Virginian-Pilot