Transparency News 4/26/18

Thursday
April 26, 2018

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state & local news stories

In U.S. PIRG rankings of state spending transparency, Virginia fell from a B- in 2016 to a C in 2018.

The FOIA Council announced several upcoming meetings of the subcommittee on public meetings and the subcommittee on remedies.

Meetings Subcommittee studying public comment at meetings
-Tuesday, June 5, 2018
-Wednesday, July 18, 2018
-Wednesday, August 22, 2018 (this meeting will be at 10:00 AM in House Room 3 of the Capitol Building; please note that the FOIA Council meets at 1:00 PM in House Room 3 the same day)

Remedies Subcommittee studying proposals to strengthen FOIA Council opinions & impose penalties for certain meetings/records violations
-Monday, May 21, 2018
-Monday, June 4, 2018

All meetings (except 8/22, as noted above) will be held in Room 300A of the Pocahontas Building, 900 E. Main St., in Richmond.

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A Powhatan County Circuit Court judge last week issued an opinion in a civil suit brought against the county that ruled largely in its favor, including agreeing that it did not have to release documents relating to an internal investigation regarding language being removed from the Subdivision Code. Judge Paul Cella issued a written opinion on Thursday, April 19 regarding the civil suit brought by former sheriff Nelson Batterson against the county.
Powhatan Today

When a Pittsylvania County school bus crashed Tuesday, one thing stood out in the police report — the bus driver’s age. The 83-year-old driver was charged with failure to yield the right of way following a wreck that sent eight students from the bus and two teenagers from another vehicle to the hospital. The driver, John Henry Patterson, has a clean driving record, according to a check of general district court records in both Pittsylvania County and Danville. Pittsylvania County Schools Transportation Director Kenyon Scott refused to talk about Peterson’s record helming school buses, saying it was a “personnel matter.” Scott could not give an average age of the county’s bus drivers without researching individual personnel records. The average Danville schools bus driver is in their mid-60s.
Register & Bee

Virginia’s Supreme Court is weighing a lawsuit brought against the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors by Washington resident Marian M. Bragg claiming the board violated the Freedom of Information Act 15 times in four meetings in 2016. When a public board enters a closed session, FOIA requires that it divulge the general purpose and subject and specify a Virginia code citation allowing the exemption to an open meeting. According to court records, Bragg claimed the board’s stated subject didn’t match the purpose or the citation. After the board of supervisors learned that the current county attorney planned to retire, five closed meetings dealt with the hiring of a new county attorney, the suit alleges. Justice William C. Mims, a former Virginia attorney general, added he had viewed the proceedings on Youtube proceedings and saw firsthand where supervisors had agreed to go into a closed meeting without citing the statute that allowed it to do so.
Culpeper Star-Exponent

Online government spending transparency continues to improve, but many states still struggle to meet 21st century standards, according to Following the Money 2018: How the 50 States Rate in Providing Online Access to Government Spending Data. This is the eighth report of its kind produced by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and Frontier Group.
U.S. PIRG
Note: Virginia fell from a B- in 2016 to a C in 2018.

stories of national interest

Government and public-sector employees are increasingly using text messaging to communicate about official business. And those communications, even if conducted on privately owned devices, are public records. Whether it’s used for personal or work, texting has become a pervasive communication channel. People read and respond to text messages immediately, and shifting between personal business and official business has never been so efficient. Despite the indisputable growth of this communication channel for work, a surprising number of public-sector agencies have not considered text messages to be an electronic public record. Several recent court cases, however, should disabuse anyone of such an outdated notion.
Smarsh

A group of news outlets requested on Tuesday that documents used by special counsel Robert Mueller to obtain warrants in his investigation into Russian election meddling be unsealed by a federal court. The media organizations — which include POLITICO, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Associated Press and CNN — are specifically seeking materials pertaining to the search warrants Mueller’s team used on Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, as well as others indicted in the federal probe.
Politico

Two-and-a-half years after a Chicago police officer was indicted for murder, the public will finally have access to a complete court docket on Thursday that will shed light on what has happened in one of the city’s most high-profile criminal cases. 
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

“Government and public-sector employees are increasingly using text messaging to communicate about official business.”

editorials & columns

“Those arrested should be afforded basic privacy measures to protect incriminating mugshots from being made public.”

It shouldn’t be this hard. Virginian-Pilot writer Ana Ley had tried to find out the location of streetlights in the region, in part because she noticed several dark spots during her nighttime travels around Portsmouth. My colleague covers local government and neighborhood issues in the port city. Several public meetings occur at night. Were many lights broken? Should the distribution of poles be adjusted? Are residents clamoring for them, or not? You would’ve thought Ley was trying to uncover President Donald Trump’s tax returns, given the roadblocks she had encountered since February. That’s when she began researching the story that was published this week. Representatives from utility giant Dominion Energy wouldn’t indicate the locations of individual streetlights.  They suggested The Pilot contact the individual cities. Some localities didn’t keep the most updated locations of the poles or couldn’t provide easy-to-use formats to study them. Portsmouth, for example, didn’t know where its 10,000-plus lights are – though City Manager Lydia Pettis-Patton said otherwise during a public work session meeting Tuesday night, after the story ran. Norfolk provided an incomplete set of files that can’t be opened in standard mapping software. Chesapeake shared partial information from 2012. That’s not exactly new, even though many of the locations are the same.
Roger Chesley, The Virginian-Pilot

April 17, 2018, eight students at the College of William and Mary, along with a dining hall employee and visiting assistant professor, were rounded up and arrested for the distribution of various drugs. These substances included marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, steroids and cocaine. In the wake of the abrupt and shocking arrests, the College community felt left in the dark by the Williamsburg Police Department. The Student Assembly, under the leadership of Brendan Boylan ’19, sent out a formal statement via email, condemning the WPD for releasing student’s names and mugshots, and for claiming that the arrests were in response to unreported sexual assaults. “The way in which WPD handled the arrests was egregious and unacceptable, with a complete disregard for the integrity of our partnership with the City and dignity for the individuals involved,” Boylan said in the email.  According to the Virginia Attorney General, police are required to release the names of an arrested suspect, as well as the mug shot if it is available. There is a long-standing debate on the ethics of releasing mug shots, and many scholars argue that such an action violates the Freedom of Information Act. The WPD may have been obligated to make this information public, but this fact bespeaks a larger issue in the American legal system: those arrested should be afforded basic privacy measures to protect incriminating mugshots from being made public.
The Flat Hat
NOTE: Virginia’s FOIA says that “adult arrestee photographs taken during the initial intake” are “required to be released” except “to avoid jeopardizing an investigation,” and even then, only until the jeopardy passes.