Transparency News 4/22/19

Monday
April 22, 2019

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state & local news stories

“The materials you handed out at the start of the meeting were not made available for public inspection until after the meeting was over.”

The Supreme Court of Virginia has adopted rules on access to judicial records — not just case records, but administrative records, too. They are slated to go into effect in mid-June. The rules largely mirror what was proposed in October and perpetuates policy problems VCOG and the Virginia Press Association have raised, particularly that the Office of Executive Secretary — an entity created by the General Assembly — as well as court administrative records should be subject to FOIA. Read the rules for yourself, as well as VCOG comments submitted in December 2018.

Richmond Public Schools expects to finish the current school year with plenty of toilet paper, paper towels and cleaning supplies at each of its buildings, according to Michelle Hudacsko, chief of staff to RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras.  That’s a far cry from last year when at least 40 of the school system’s 52 buildings, including the Richmond Technical Center, ran short of the essentials, resulting in a small brigade of parents and others pitching in to provide toilet paper and paper towels. Cindy L. Anderson, an RPS parent and businesswoman, created a fundraising site to generate donations and then played a key role in purchasing and delivering the supplies in an effort to resolve the embarrassing situation. While RPS operations manager James Oliver was held responsible for the debacle and fired after 49 years with the school system, the reality is far different, according to a 2018 chain of RPS emails that Ms. Anderson later secured through a Freedom of Information Act request. According to the emails, Mr. Kamras failed to consider the requests for money for the supply budget an urgent matter and then downplayed the problem. The emails show that Mr. Kamras received a request to shift $50,000 to the depleted custodial supply budget on Wednesday, May 23, but didn’t approve it until nine days later on Friday, June 1. The delay only made the shortage worse.
Richmond Free Press

Private attorney David Konick, a member of the Rappahannock County Board of Zoning Appeals, is counseling the chairman of the Rappahannock County Planning Commission about provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. “Hopefully, a word to the wise will be sufficient, and you won’t be attacked in the local news-rag of ‘sliding under FOIA’ because in fact, you didn’t ‘slide under’ anything, you violated it,” Konick wrote Friday afternoon to Planning Commission Chair Gary Light. Konick told Light that at two recent Planning meetings he failed to follow two FOIA provisions, one requiring that when a particular meeting’s materials are furnished to the board they shall simultaneously be made available for public inspection. “You failed to do this at the Commission’s last work session. The materials you handed out at the start of the meeting were not made available for public inspection until after the meeting was over,” the lawyer told Light via email.
Rappahannock News

In the midst of ongoing court proceedings regarding a misdemeanor count of soliciting prostitution, Front Royal Mayor Hollis Tharpe announced on Friday that he will resign from office. Tharpe – whose second mayoral term will expire in 2020 – said over the phone that the resignation, which will become effective May 2, was decided upon with the best interest of the town in mind. Town Attorney Doug Napier said over the phone that the Town Council can either petition Warren County Circuit Court for a special election to fill Tharpe’s seat or appoint a mayor to fill out the remainder of his term. Napier said the council has 45 days after the resignation to make the decision. Napier said the council could appoint either a council member or a citizen to serve as interim mayor before the special election takes place.
The Northern Virginia Daily

stories of national interest

Time and again, Mr. Trump’s advisers took notes of their interactions with the president or drafted memos immediately afterward to maintain real-time records, in some cases simply to have an accurate understanding to do their jobs better, but in other cases for self-preservation. While aides in past administrations recognized that notes could become public and shied away from recording sensitive information in writing to protect the president, many of Mr. Trump’s aides took pen to paper to protect themselves from the president. Cliff Sims, a former communications aide to Mr. Trump who wrote the book “Team of Vipers” about his time in the White House, said he and others took notes during meetings with the president to “ensure everyone was echoing his messaging” when they went out to speak for him in public. “But I do think there’s also a pervasive sense in this White House that at some point you’re going to have to set the record straight or give your perspective on events that took place, or actions you took — or didn’t take — as the case may be,” Mr. Sims said on Sunday.
The New York Times

Proposed updates to New Jersey’s civil service rules for reporting and investigating alleged instances of sexual harassment would actually discourage victims from coming forward and silence them from telling anyone else about the incidents, one of the state’s top lawmakers has said. As NJSpotlight reports, Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg called the confidentiality provision of the proposed rule “an affront to survivors everywhere.” by the state Civil Service Commission say that anyone who fails to comply with the confidentiality requirement will face disciplinary action which could include being fired, according to the report. The current policy also punishes victims who broach the confidentiality requirement.
Observer
 

editorials & columns

“The rise of massive centralized FOIA archives, digitized news archives and a bit of statistical analysis can help scholars readily peer through those dark markings and fill in the redacted blanks.”

The release of the Mueller report this past week has brought with it renewed interest in the practice of “redaction” in which the government blacks out portions of officially released documents to preserve confidential information. The topic has received more media attention on television in the past week than it has in the past decade, while globally as much as 2% of worldwide online news coverage mentioned the term at its peak on Thursday. Yet, the rise of massive centralized FOIA archives, digitized news archives and a bit of statistical analysis can help scholars readily peer through those dark markings and fill in the redacted blanks. One of the great weaknesses of the governmental redaction process is the lack of centralized government-wide coordination in determining just what is sensitive enough to warrant obscuring from public view. One government agency’s most sensitive secret is another agency’s view of public information. This leads to a situation in which multiple government agencies may release the same declassified document with different redactions. As non-profits, private companies and academic institutions have focused on assembling vast archives of government documents in recent decades, it has become steadily easier to look across the totality of a government’s publicly released output for patterns.
Kalev Leetaru, Forbes

The nation’s grocery stores have long kept confidential the amount consumers spend at individual stores with cash, credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. To business owners large and small, this store-level sales data is undoubtedly confidential because its release would provide an unfair advantage to competitors. We have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the appropriate standard for exempting this data from public release — including whether the plain meaning of “confidential” should be applied or whether businesses must prove substantial competitive harm in every instance. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was created to shine a light on the government, not on private parties. Congress expressly exempted confidential commercial information from mandatory disclosure because that disclosure can harm private interests without adding much insight about the government’s own work. Revealing store-level SNAP sales data will not illuminate the government’s activities; it simply opens grocers to unfair competitive harm.
Leslie Sarasin, USA Today