The Checks & Balances Projects has sent a letter to the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) to ask for mediation services to force the U.S. Coast Guard’s to comply with our lawful records requests under the Freedom of Information Act. OGIS, which is the federal government’s FOIA Ombudsman, harshly criticized the Coast Guard in a September 2015 report on FOIA compliance. But the Coast Guard appears to have learned little from the OGIS report over the past year.
Checks & Balances Project
The Hampton City Council will revisit its guidelines on board appointments Wednesday after objections from Mayor Donnie Tuck over a vote and some apparent disagreement over the interpretation of the new rules. The council talked at length at a retreat in August about citizen appointments to a variety of civic boards. Tuck said his goal was to get more people involved by reducing the number of people serving on several boards at once or for extended periods of time. The council never voted on a policy regarding the appointment process or codified it officially, but a slate of generally agreed-upon points were read out at a later meeting in August. The guidelines became a point of conflict in September when the council appointed former City Manager and Mayor George Wallace to the city’s Economic Development Authority over Tuck’s objections that Wallace’s appointment flew in the face of the guidelines.
Daily Press
Winchester has declined to provide more information on the removal of Peter Serafin from the Board of Architectural Review (BAR). Specifically, the city will not say who reviewed a transcript of a conversation Serafin had about the Winchester Towers — cited as the reason for his removal — and brought it to City Council’s attention. Serafin, the former chairman of the BAR, was removed from his position at a Sept. 27 meeting of City Council via a unanimously adopted resolution, with Council President John Willingham abstaining. There was no public discussion. The matter was discussed in two different closed sessions. Serafin said on Monday by telephone that he feels he was “unjustly removed.” When asked if it is usual procedure to begin recording before a public meeting begins, city communications manager Amy Simmons said in a Tuesday email that “the system was properly turned on . . . to ensure an appropriate setup before the meeting began,” which is “a normal process in preparing for public meetings where minutes are recorded.”
Winchester Star
Former BVU officials handed out $2 million in electric ratepayer money to a range of “economic development” projects — many that are now closed or bankrupt — with virtually no oversight or recordkeeping. A recent audit by the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts revealed that BVU spent about $2 million on more than a dozen projects between 2008 and 2015. But current BVU officials could find no applications, business plans, information about what grant money went for, any benefit to the electric utility or documentation of how many jobs were created, BVU President and CEO Don Bowman said Tuesday.
Bristol Herald Courier
National Stories
The White House announced the creation of 29 tools Thursday that use Federal and local data to address problems identified by Federal agencies as part of the Opportunity Project, an open data effort to improve economic mobility for all Americans. The Department of Energy said that educational equity is a national priority. In order to achieve educational equity, Data Society and Kitamba built the Philadelphia School Resource Mapper. The Mapper uses Census Bureau, Health and Human Services, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services data to help schools create partnerships and identify where non-profit organizations can make the greatest impact.
MeriTalk
Editorials/Columns
VA officials in Richmond have announced the discovery of 20 to 30 boxes of veterans’ documents — including at least a “handful” of unfiled claims for health assistance — in a storage unit once leased by a former VA employee. The VA said the former employee already had been fired in August 2015 after officials found unfiled health applications on her desk. All those veterans were contacted and their cases were resolved, said the VA, according to a report by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. But unfiled paperwork on her desk was only part of the story. he VA papers were mixed among the ex-employee’s private papers. Officials are only partway through the process of sorting the documents and determining how much work the employee left undone. So far, they say, only a “handful” of applications for assistance were secreted and ignored. That does not address, however, just how serious that handful of cases might have been.
Daily Progress