Wednesday, June 24, 2015
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State and Local Stories
A General District Court judge dismissed a Freedom of Information Act petition Tuesday after the Pittsylvania County Agricultural Development Board admitted it made mistakes, but said it has put a corrective action plan in place and will follow Virginia’s open meetings and public records laws. Claiming they were shut out of an improperly closed meeting, three residents — Deborah Dix of Blairs, Phillip Lovelace of Gretna, and Karen Maute of Danville — filed a FOIA complaint against the agricultural board. According to the petition, the agricultural board went into a closed meeting on April 8 at the Olde Dominion Agricultural Complex to discuss a “personnel matter and a couple of other things” even though it has no employees. Several board members “escorted” Dix and Lovelace from the meeting and building, locking them out in a storm with thunder and lightning, the petition claimed. They went to their cars and waited for a signal that the public meeting had resumed, but after 30 minutes both left. The board’s chairman, Callands farmer Jay Calhoun, said the closed meeting was to evaluate the county’s director of agribusiness development, Fred Wydner III. In court Tuesday, the county’s attorney, Vaden Hunt, conceded that the agricultural board acted improperly, but noted the county immediately put a corrective action plan in place when notified of the violation. Hunt said the agricultural board’s mistakes were caused by a “lack of knowledge concerning the technical and intricate Virginia FOIA closed session requirements, and not because of willfulness, malice, or intention.” Judge J. Larry Palmer of Bedford, satisfied by the agricultural board’s mea culpa, dismissed the petition for a writ of mandamus compelling the county to follow the law. “I’m very upset that volunteer citizens are being sued in open court,” said Staunton River District Supervisor Elton Blackstock. “I think this could have been resolved a much easier way. This is not representative of the citizens who have lived in this county for many generations. When we disagree, we sit down and talk.”
Star-Tribune
National Stories
Western Watersheds Project has filed a federal lawsuit against Wildlife Services, saying the federal agency hasn’t responded to its Freedom of Information Act requests for documents detailing its activities in killing wildlife in Idaho. Talasi Brooks, an attorney with Advocates for the West, which is representing the conservation group in the case, said, “The Freedom of Information Act’s basic purpose is to open agency action to the light of public scrutiny. Wildlife Services has never disclosed the full nature, extent and environmental impacts of its Idaho operations. We hope this lawsuit will force the agency to produce the information requested so we can make sure Idahoans know what Wildlife Services is up to in our state.”
Spokesman-Review
Declaring crash reports are not motor vehicle records, Pulaski County (Arkansas) Circuit Judge Morgan "Chip" Welch ruled Tuesday that the Arkansas State Police cannot deny bulk inspection of the reports. After a law was passed last year requiring that personal information of minors be redacted from crash reports, state police implemented a new policy in January that no longer allowed bulk inspection of crash reports — the examination of multiple reports at one time — because redacting minors' information was an administrative burden. In June the agency began withholding nearly all personal information from crash reports made available to the public, citing the 21-year-old federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act. Little Rock attorney Daniel Wren sued the state police in May for access to the bulk reports after his request for the records under the Freedom of Information Act was denied.
Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette
The agency that houses the U.S. Constitution and other important historical documents has found signs of unauthorized computer activity similar to the recently disclosed hack of federal employment records, according to a report on federal technology publication nextgov.com. The National Archives and Records Administration found signs that files were moved around, although there was no evidence that hackers took administrative control of its computer systems, nextgov.com said in its report.
Reuters
Data is the lifeblood of state government. It's the crucial commodity that's necessary to manage projects, avoid fraud, assess program performance, keep the books in balance and deliver services efficiently. But even as the trend toward greater reliance on data has accelerated over the past decades, the information itself has fallen dangerously short of the mark. Sometimes it doesn't exist at all. But worse than that, all too often it's just wrong. There are examples everywhere. Last year, the California auditor's office issued a report that looked at accounting records at the State Controller's Office to see whether it was accurately recording sick leave and vacation credits. "We found circumstances where instead of eight hours, it was 80 and in one case, 800," says Elaine Howle, the California state auditor. "And the system didn't have controls to say that's impossible." The audit found 200,000 questionable hours of leave due to data entry errors, with a value of $6 million. Mistakes like that are embarrassing, and can lead to unequal treatment of valued employees. Sometimes, however, decisions made with bad data can have deeper consequences. In 2012, the secretary of environmental protection in Pennsylvania told Congress that there was no evidence the state's water quality had been affected by fracking. "Tens of thousands of wells have been hydraulically fractured in Pennsylvania," he said, "without any indication that groundwater quality has been impacted." But by August 2014, the same department published a list of 248 incidents of damage to well water due to gas development. Why didn't the department pick up on the water problems sooner? A key reason was that the data collected by its six regional offices had not been forwarded to the central office. At the same time, the regions differed greatly in how they collected, stored, transmitted and dealt with the information. An audit concluded that Pennsylvania's complaint tracking system for water quality was ineffective and failed to provide "reliable information to effectively manage the program."
Governing
Editorials/Columns
Is the fix already in regarding central Virginia’s new emergency-responder radio system? One of the big competitors for the contract, Harris Corp., says it is — and plans to withdraw its bid. The company gripes that the specs set by local governments are written so that only one company, Motorola, can meet them. City and county officials dispute that. Who’s right? We don’t know. Probably few people do. The request for proposals lays out a mind-boggling 5,227 technical specifications. The number gives new meaning to the term “technocrat.”
Times-Dispatch
Rather than empower politicians and unelected factotums to decide what can and can’t be on plates, why not abolish all specialty license plates? Personalized ones, too. Won’t happen. License plates are big business in Virginia. Specialty plates, which range in price from $10 to $25 each, netted the state almost $9 million last year. Personalized plates – at 10 bucks extra each year – brought in another $9.3 million, according to the DMV. Along with all that loot are a lot of headaches. Anyone else remember the ugly flap over the “ICUHAJI” plate? Several years ago, an Iraq War veteran in Chesapeake had his personalized tags revoked at first because they were deemed to be offensive to Arab Americans and later because the DMV said they could condone violence. Look, the purpose of license plates is for quick identification and to help cops catch bad guys. They shouldn’t be government-approved billboards to show how clever you are. Or which wacky organizations you support.
Kerry Dougherty, Virginian-Pilot
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in a First Amendment issue that had tormented Virginia legislators and judges for the past 15 years. The case came from Texas, but Virginians should be familiar with the issue: specialty license plates and the Confederate battle flag. What the high court said, in a 5–4 decision, is that a specialty license plate program is a form of government speech and the First Amendment does not prohibit the state from rejecting some messages. Another license-plate case familiar to Virginians is awaiting action by the high court. This case, from North Carolina, deals with “Choose Life” license plates. The issue is whether the government speech doctrine permits the state of North Carolina to promote its “Choose Life” message through a specialty license plate program without also offering a pro-choice specialty plate.
Free Lance-Star