Transparency News 7/23/14

Several Hampton City Schools administrators quietly received about $30,000 in raises last month, according to documents received Tuesday by the Daily Press. The raises came after the school division made drastic cuts to balance its $196 million budget, slashing nearly $7 million in expenses and receiving supplemental funding from the city to help preserve jobs. The Daily Press received information on the raises under the Freedom of Information Act, which detailed what the School Board called "equity adjustments" for members of its Division Leadership Team. "When it comes to an expenditure of public funds, the public really doesn't like to find about things after the fact," said Megan Rhyne, director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. She said while the board might have valid reasons for giving the raises it would have been better if they discussed them openly.
Daily Press

A police investigation of a plumber convicted of bribing city workers found no wrongdoing beyond an FBI probe that led to charges against three men, a city spokeswoman said this week. Andrew Zoby Jr., owner of Zoby Mechanical, was charged in March 2013 with bribing city workers and submitting fraudulent invoices to the city. His company had been the city's plumbing contractor since 2001.
Virginian-Pilot

Steven Gould, one of two new members who just joined the Danville School Board, began a new tradition Tuesday: holding “office hours” in various locations around Danville. Gould said he intends to hold office hours every month, and when the school year starts, hold similar get-togethers at public schools so he can talk with teachers, staff and administrators. It is believed he is the first school board member to hold such meetings, Gould said; while the board does occasionally hold a community meeting, residents normally have to attend a board meeting or contact individual board members to have their ideas and concerns heard.
Register & Bee

The 12th Annual Digital Counties Survey from the Center for Digital Government includes Roanoke, Fairfax, Loudoun, Chesterfield, Arlington, Albemarle, Gloucester, Franklin and Montgomery Counties. The deadline for submitting entries for the Digital Cities survey is Aug. 12.
Center for Digital Government

Although Emma Sims wants to go back to work in a school cafeteria, she said Friday she is not going to be “pacified” by the Halifax County School Board’s offer last week to work as a substitute cafeteria worker in the upcoming school year. The former school cafeteria employee claims she was fired from her cafeteria job after “blowing the whistle” on a rat dropping incident that occurred at Halifax County Middle School in February 2013.  Sims said she believes she lost her full-time cafeteria job because she told school board members she had witnessed an incident of rat droppings on biscuits prepared at Halifax County Middle School.
Gazette-Virginian

A four-month-old psychiatric-bed registry that is supposed to provide up-to-the-minute information for Virginians who need emergency mental health treatment is being updated as seldom as once a day, state officials told a panel of lawmakers this week.
Washington Post

National Stories

House investigators said Tuesday that the computer hard drive of ex-agency official Lois Lerner — a key figure in the IRS targeting scandal — was only “scratched,” not irreparably damaged, as Americans have been led to believe. GOP-led Ways and Means Committee investigators, in their quest to recover missing Lerner emails, learned her hard drive was damaged but recoverable by talking to IRS information-technology experts, after the government originally refused to make them available, according to the committee. Learning that the hard drive was only scratched also raises questions about why the IRS refused to use outside experts to recover the data.
Fox News

After all the late-night TV jokes about what exactly Warren G. Harding referred to himself as when writing to his lover, Harding’s grand-nephew joked that his father ought to have sealed the love letters for 25 years longer. “There are times when I wish he’d sealed them for 75 years,” Richard Harding said Tuesday at a Library of Congress event. “The family’s had some frustration that now most articles and inquiries so far have focused more on the titillating phrases rather than the meaningful historical content.”
Politico

A coalition formed to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to increase transparency criticized the justices on Tuesday for not doing more to boost public access to court proceedings in the term just ended.
LegalTimes
 

Editorials/Columns

Earlier this month, the Daily Progress and other media reported that the Supreme Court of Virginia awarded $250 in damages to climate scientist Michael Mann and the University of Virginia in a prominent Virginia FOIA lawsuit that we wrote about in April. (See also petitioners’ case documents webpage.)  The media did not post an actual copy of the order making the award, and non-legal media often doesn’t get legal details quite right, so we questioned via tweets whether that money was actually “damages” or merely an award of appeal costs. (This is an important distinction: Damages are something awarded to a party when another party has caused a legal injury without a legal justification; appeal costs are routinely awarded to prevailing parties in an appeal without fault under Va. Rule 5:35.) We now have a copy of the order, and it appears the media was dead-on … and the Supreme Court of Virginia was dead wrong.
Open Virginia Law

Roanoke and Botetourt county supervisors cannot be faulted for taking a hard look before investing $2 million in broadband infrastructure during tough financial times. That’s their job. But when the debate strays into broad ideological discussions about the proper role of government, they are on shaky ground. Government at the federal, state and local levels all have a role to play in creating the common infrastructure that even capitalist systems need to be competitive today – and to be well positioned to remain competitive in the future.
Roanoke Times

EVER SINCE the Virginia Bar Association announced that Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Warner and his Republican challenger Ed Gillespie had agreed to a debate hosted by the VBA this weekend, political wags have mocked one fact—the debate will be held in West Virginia, not Virginia.  That’s because the VBA’s annual meeting is being held at The Greenbrier, the famous hot springs resort hotel, which is in West Virginia. It’s not the first time the VBA has met there, nor the first time a debate in a statewide race for a Virginia political office has been held there. But focusing on the fact that this first debate between two U.S. Senate candi dates will be out of state misses the larger picture—which is that even if the debate were held at the VBA’s other usual venue of choice, the Homestead (also a famous hot springs resort hotel), it would be no more accessible to the average Virginian.
Free Lance-Star

The South Carolina Supreme Court last week dealt another serious blow to the public’s ability to know what government officials are doing with a curiously reasoned ruling that autopsy records are exempt from the state Freedom of Information Act because they are medical records. The court’s decision, especially coming on the heels of another one less than a month ago pertaining to a governing body’s once-presumed requirement to publish an agenda in advance of a meeting, reflects a dangerously limited view of the state law designed to ensure that citizens have access to the actions and records of public bodies and public officials.
The Greenville News