Virginia Coalition for Open Government

Transparency News 12/29/14

Monday, December 29, 2014

 

State and Local Stories

It’s pretty common in Virginia for city councils, county boards of supervisors and school boards to start meetings with a prayer, but Del. Richard P. “Dickie” Bell, R-Staunton, is proposing a law that formally allows for public invocation before each meeting of a public body. The idea, as his legislation says, is to make sure public bodies “shall not produce over time a pattern of invocations or prayers that targets a particular religious perspective for denigration, threatens damnation, or preaches conversion.”
Daily Press

The shadow cast by a contentious year between Powhatan County’s Board of Supervisors and School Board was at the forefront of a resolution passed by the supervisors at their meeting on Monday, Dec. 15. The supervisors voted 3-2 in favor of a resolution that at its rootauthorized the hiring of a facilitator for a joint workshop between the two boards in 2015.  At the heart of the debate were two issues – the question of whether the boards actually needed a third party to mediate between them and whether it was sound fiscally to have each board spend $3,000 – for a total of $6,000 – to hire the consultant.
Powhatan Today

Months ago, a lone Roanoke County supervisor stood behind a lectern in front of the county administration building. He held a news conference to discuss his investigation into county personnel issues, something beyond his job description. Still, he called out fellow board members for not involving themselves. They had previously reprimanded him for getting involved in personnel problems. While the situation was unusual, this year at least, discord among members of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors has become the norm. Comments from members discussing the past year paint a picture of a dysfunctional board, one with more arguing among members than actual decision-making. Nearly every board member said the year was a challenging one, mostly because of disagreements among their peers.
Roanoke Times

Rockingham County is about to look a whole lot prettier to digital visitors. The county’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism is accepting bids for a complete redesign of the economic development website, which hasn’t been updated in several years, as well as a completely new tourism website, which the county does not have. George Anas, assistant county administrator and director of economic development, said not having a tourism website was a blind spot for the county. “We have no real way right now to understand who visits us online and from where in the world,” he said, “which is the sort of information we are in a desperate need of.” Economic development has been the main emphasis for the county for a while now, Anas said, so there was no real push to establish a tourism website. But after a recent staff expansion, it seemed like a good time to “blaze a path” in that area, he said.
Daily News Record

National Stories

From mysteriously missing emails to confessions of voter deception, federal officials spent much of 2014 hiding their activities behind closed doors. Originally approved by Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, FOIA has since been regularly updated to adapt to changes in the technology and media landscapes. Hundreds of thousands of FOIA requests are filed every year, mostly for routine documents such as military, family and entitlement records. But thousands of those FOIA requests are for documents that somebody, somewhere in the government, would prefer not be made public. Consequently, 2014, like so many years before, saw thousands of FOIA requests left to gather dust in government offices.
Washington Examiner

Jason Leopold offers this advice to reporters: File a few FOIA requests each month to get a pipeline of information in an “era of secrecy.” Leopold, an investigative reporter covering national security intelligence and Guantanamo (GITMO) for VICE News, wasn’t always such a crusader for public documents. He recalls a few times in the “Bush years” when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request about the CIA’s interrogation program, was rejected and simply “let it go.” That’s over. After he broke a big story two or three years ago borne out of a FOIA document and watched the splashy media attention and government reaction, he transformed into a FOIA-filing machine.
American Journalism Review

Agencies have made tremendous progress in the past six years on opening an ever-larger collection of government data. What started in some corners as a grudging post of whatever spreadsheet (or, worse, PDF) was readily available, mainly to appease the Obama administration, has grown into a truly rich ecosystem of valuable and usable data. "Usable" does not automatically mean "used," however. Many agencies still struggle to determine what datasets are truly in demand and which ones effectively go into cold storage on Data.gov. And although "open by default" is an admirable policy, the reality of resource constraints mean that most agencies must triage their open-data efforts – hopefully in a way that moves the most valuable data to the front of the line.
Federal Computer Week

Jeb Bush got reams of emails during his days as the governor of Florida. And he often didn’t hesitate to respond, even to the most rambling of constituents, even to the harshest of critics. The Republican, who is mulling a 2016 run for the presidency, recently announced he would release some 250,000 emails from his days leading the Sunshine State. But public records laws have let interested parties get the material before Bush’s official release, and on Friday the pro-Democratic group American Bridge posted a slew of the documents online.
Politico

 

Editorials/Columns

Gov. Terry McAuliffe asked his ethics reform panel to consider redistricting as well as the culture of gift-giving in Richmond. He was right to do so, because gerrymandering constitutes a corruption of the political system every bit as corrosive to democracy as influence-peddling. The panel’s chairmen, former Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and former Rep. Rick Boucher, have issued a set of recommendations to fix the problem. In brief, they urge a constitutional amendment to create an independent, bipartisan redistricting commission. We concur. The current system amounts to an incumbency-protection scheme in which lawmakers draw district lines first to protect current office-holders, and then to protect the majority party. 
Times-Dispatch

There's no less democratic way of redrawing legislative districts than the one Virginia employs now. That's why the bipartisan ethics panel convened by Gov. Terry McAuliffe has recommended abandoning the rigged system. Members of the governor's Commission on Integrity and Public Confidence in State Government proposed last week that the General Assembly approve a constitutional amendment creating a bipartisan committee to select electoral districts. Convincing Virginia's lawmakers is likely to prove difficult. Unless the law changes, after the 2020 Census, Virginia's delegates and senators will select their own districts, as well as the ones for Congress, for the next decade.
Virginian-Pilot

For all the hand-wringing about money in politics, the real problem is redistricting — the process of drawing the boundaries of legislative districts. The governor’s ethics commission should use its resources — and its members’ experience and clout — to expose the way cities, counties and towns are routinely split during the redistricting process.
Register & Bee

This time of year, we pray for peace on Earth. Peace on the Richmond School Board would be a good start. A cessation of hostilities presumably was at the top of the Christmas list of Superintendent Dana Bedden. If the drama continues, he might ask Santa for a new job next year. A Richmond School Board member and an activist filed separate protective orders against another board member for things that allegedly happened during the board’s Dec. 8 meeting. The drama will have no impact on the ultimate direction of the board. But the squabbling does drag down the perception of a board and school district already in need of image enhancement. If you’re on the board’s minority faction, might collaboration achieve more than confrontation?
Michael Paul Williams, Times-Dispatch

The ability to solicit information from government officials — particularly when it comes to material showing them in a less-than-favorable light — is a fundamental way of keeping tabs on those in power. So it was disheartening to see Congress fail to pass a bill during the lame-duck session that would strengthen the federal Freedom of Information Act. That the bill had bipartisan support and was endorsed by 70 organizations that advocate for accountability and transparency in government only makes that failure worse. The bill would have curtailed some exemptions that now allow the withholding of information, and would have required agencies subject to the act to make records available electronically. These would have been desirable updates to the law. As it stands, there were more freedom of information lawsuits filed this year than in any year since at least 2001, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In our minds, that speaks to an unmet desire — much of it legitimate — for information.
Denver Post