Transparency News 11/2/16

State and Local Stories
 

For 57 years, Arlington County has held a board meeting on the federal New Year’s Day holiday, to ensure that the county government can declare it is the first in the region to get to work in the new year. Now Libby Garvey (D), the board chairman, is proposing an end to that tradition. She says New Year’s Day should be reserved for family and friends — not just for board members, but for the handful of county employees who, because of the meeting, must work that day as well. “I love traditions, too, and maybe we need to keep this one, but in the past you wrote a letter to the board, put a stamp on it and mailed it, then waited for their response,” said Garvey, whose proposal to move the first board meeting of the year to Jan. 3 is part of the consent agenda for this Saturday’s board session. “We used to have telephones attached to the wall with long cords, too.” Jay Fisette (D), the longest-serving County Board member, said he doesn’t support Garvey’s proposal. “The January 1 meeting is designed for the community, to maximize the opportunity for the public to engage with us and for the County Board to communicate our vision for the coming year,” he said. “Moving it to a business day doesn’t have the same impact.”
Washington Post

The reading rooms at the Library of Virginia will close Saturdays and Mondays to help address job cuts due to the statewide drop in revenue projections announced last month. The new schedule begins Nov. 14. The move comes after the library was told it must cut 18 employees — 12 full time and six part time — to offset a state-mandated 5 percent budget reduction.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Former Richmond City Manager Robert Bobb laid out his firm’s short-term plan to deliver Petersburg from financial peril on Tuesday, a week after taking command of the city’s beleaguered administration. “This is not rocket science, we can make this happen,” he said, drawing applause after criticizing what he described as a lack of transparency surrounding the city’s financial challenges. For example, employees with his company, the Robert Bobb Group, have struggled to find basic information about revenue projections. Before the meeting, city Treasurer Kevin Brown said he could not provide a reporter with tax collection revenues from last year, or give an estimate of where collections were anticipated to be at this point in fiscal 2017.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

National Stories
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Tuesday released files related to a years-old probe involving former President Bill Clinton, further stirring Democrats’ anger over the agency’s disclosure of newly discovered emails possibly related to Hillary Clinton. The heavily redacted case files released were part of a 2001 probe into Mr. Clinton’s pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. FBI officials said the release wasn’t intentionally done during the last days of the election campaign.
Wall Street Journal

The Central Intelligence Agency yesterday released a long-sought draft of the fifth volume of its internal history of the 1961 invasion of the Bay of Pigs. The release was among the first tangible results of this year’s amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, which imposed a 25 year limit on the exemption for “deliberative” files. As a result, the 1984 draft history could no longer be legally withheld. CIA said in a cover note that “This fifth draft volume was not publishable in its present form, in the judgment of CIA Chief Historians as well as other reviewers, because of serious shortcomings in scholarship, its polemical tone, and its failure to add significantly to an understanding of the controversy over the Bay of Pigs operation.”
Secrecy News