Transparency News 12/19/18

		Wednesday December 19, 2018
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state & local news stories

Information you need:
VCOG’s annual legislative bill chart

Three bills have now been filed, all dealing with the identity of lottery winners.

HB 1650 prohibits the release of names of winners of prizes worth more than $10 million
SB 1060 allows a winner to submit a written notice that he/she does not wish his/her “personal information,” released
SB 1082 prohibits the release of any information about winners unless the winner consents in writing.

Here’s an op-ed about lottery winner names written by former VCOG board member Frank LoMonte, published in June in The Washington Post

Without the police data it says it needs to draft bylaws, the Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board said Tuesday that it cannot move forward with its mission. In August, the seven-person board began its specific task of drafting bylaws that will guide a later, functional board. On Tuesday, the members of the CRB appeared to agree that they could not move forward with drafting the bylaws, saying data on arrests and stop-and-frisks were crucial to its task. “We believe as a CRB we should get access to data that lets us know what is going on with our city,” member Sarah Burke said. “City Council seems to think that we can draft bylaws apart from that data.”
The Daily Progress

Charlottesville’s city councilors spent nearly eight hours on Tuesday at a retreat that weaved between team-building exercises with a facilitator and a de-facto therapy session as they aired their grievances with each other, the media and the community members who address them at meetings. Councilors hesitated several times in the meeting before sharing thoughts that could be posted on Twitter or printed in ink. The retreat was not televised. The retreat later focused on the conduct of City Council meetings.
The Daily Progress

stories of national interest

A federal appellate court has rejected a non-profit organization’s attempt to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax records from the Internal Revenue Service by filing a Freedom of Information Act request. DC Circuit Court Judge Karen Henderson wrote that the President should be afforded the same privacy rights as any other citizen. “This case presents the question whether a member of the public — here, a nonprofit organization — can use a FOIA request to obtain an unrelated individual’s tax records without his consent,” Henderson wrote in a opinion on behalf of herself and two other appellate judges. “With certain limited exceptions — all inapplicable here — the answer is no.”
WRAL

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released emails surrounding Chairman Ajit Pai’s infamous Harlem Shake video after a nearly year-long public records battle. MuckRock journalist JPat Brown reported Monday that the agency finally relented after initially denying him access to the emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Brown states that the FCC originally cited the b(5) exemption in April of last year, claiming that such a “disclosure would foreseeably harm the staff’s ability to execute its functions by freely discussing relevant matters.”
The Daily Dot

“This case presents the question whether a member of the public — here, a nonprofit organization — can use a FOIA request to obtain an unrelated individual’s tax records without his consent.”