Transparency News 4/20/18

Each year, General Assembly members are required to disclose information about their personal financial holdings that could pose a potential conflict with their public duties. VPAP has compiled the 2018 disclosures, which include income, stock holdings, debts, business interests, real estate and any gifts they received valued at more than $50. Click on any legislator’s name and view their disclosure.
Virginia Public Access Project

At least two Hampton City Council candidates have been on the city’s radar due to delinquent tax payments. According to records obtained from City Treasurer Molly Ward, candidates Steven L. Brown and Richelle D. Wallace have been habitually late paying their Hampton taxes, often requiring the city to issuing liens to collect back payments.
Daily Press

Prior to the start of the 2018 General Assembly session in January, Charlottesville officials agreed to pay $50,000 for lobbyist services. Nearly all of the legislation the contracted firm was hired to support failed. According to city officials, proposed legislation would have given the city authority to remove its Confederate monuments and adopt specific firearm restrictions.  “The city knew that the chances of achieving legislative amendments would be slim, but wanted to give proposed legislation the best possible chance,” said an email in a response to a series of questions posed to City Manager Maurice Jones and Interim City Attorney Lisa Robertson earlier this month.
The Daily Progress

Revealing details about the living conditions of hens would give business rivals an edge and irreparably harm small egg producers in Texas, an egg company executive testified Thursday on the first day of a rare Freedom of Information Act bench trial. “That information will give a competitor a pretty good indication of what our cost of production is and also what our capacity is,” said David Elbel, president of Feather Crest Farms, based in Bryan, Texas. Elbel was the first witness in a rare bench trial over whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can exclude details from Texas egg farm inspection reports on the number of hens and hen houses along with cage rows, tiers and floors per hen house. The Animal Legal Defense Fund sued the FDA in 2012 for withholding that information from 2011 inspection reports.
Courthouse News Service

A Minneapolis freedom-of-information activist has claimed victory in his long-running legal battle to see emails from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office pertaining to biometric technologies. The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday largely backed Tony Webster, who said the county violated Minnesota’s open records law when it denied him access to emails he requested in 2015. He had wanted to learn about how the sheriff’s office uses biometrics, including facial recognition technologies. The county said his requests were too burdensome. An administrative law judge sided with Webster.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

On Tuesday, the FBI restored 70 data tables that were missing from the 2016 Crime in the United States report, providing data that researchers consider crucial to their understanding of crime trends in the U.S. over time. The yearly report is considered the gold standard for tracking crime statistics in the United States, gathered from over 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in cities around the country. But the 2016 report, the first compiled under the Trump administration, was missing dozens of data tables that researchers rely on.
FiveThirtyEight

In just the last few weeks and months, U.S. military officials imposed new restrictions on media interviews and base visits, at least temporarily; they blocked (but later permitted) publication of current data on the extent of insurgent control of Afghanistan; and they classified previously unclassified information concerning future flight tests of ballistic missile defense systems.
Secrecy News