Transparency News, 8/10/20

 

All five Democrats on the Prince William Board of County Supervisors are facing a new lawsuit that alleges they held an illegal meeting with the police department, community leaders and citizens after police and protesters clashed during a May “Black Lives Matter” protest in Manassas. Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth (D) said in June that the supervisors’ attendance at the meeting was not illegal. County residents Alan Gloss, Tammy Spinks and Carol Fox filed the lawsuit in Prince William County Circuit Court on July 31 against board Chair Ann Wheeler, D-At Large, and Supervisors Victor Angry, D-Neabsco, Kenny Boddye, D-Occoquan, Margaret Franklin, D-Woodbridge and Andrea Bailey, D-Potomac.  Judicial Watch has teamed up with Gloss, Spinks and Fox in their lawsuit. Judicial Watch is “a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law,” according to their website.
Prince William Times

Shenandoah County Public Schools Superintendent Mark Johnston released a statement on late Friday afternoon concerning an email that he had sent to a county resident about the renaming of two local schools. “My poorly crafted email was critical of an individual for what I felt was taking advantage of the charged emotions around the issue,” Johnston stated in the news release. “My comments were directed only at that individual. I had received an email from a parent indicating they felt like I was suggesting that anti-name change folks were ignorant or racist. That was certainly not my intent. I had previously apologized to the individual and I apologize to any person who took my comments as directed at them.” A mailer was delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to an unknown number of Shenandoah County residents on Friday. It contained four pages of unattributed content regarding the superintendent, School Board members and this week’s board meeting where discussion on renaming Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary is on the agenda. The front page article of the mailer claims Johnston’s letter to the local resident was obtained through a Freedom of Information request.
The Northern Virginia Daily

Halifax Town Council plans to vote on a resolution to update protocol for citizens’ comments and public hearings at its meeting Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the town hall at 70 S. Main St. A public hearing and a public comment period also are on the meeting agenda. “This resolution is to emphasize the speaker time limits, and it contains more language about speaker comportment and being respectful,” said Halifax town manager Carl Espy. Espy said the town has had a time limit of three minutes per speaker on public comments at council meetings since January 2008. At Tuesday’s meeting, Espy said each speaker would be notified when two minutes’ time had lapsed and would be asked to conclude their comments at the three-minute mark.
The Gazette-Virginian

 

 

 

The Detroit Free Press is suing the city of Detroit for access to all of the public records connected to a city watchdog’s investigation that concluded Mayor Mike Duggan gave preferential treatment to a prenatal health program run by a woman with close ties to him. The Free Press attempted to obtain the records through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in August 2019. The city eventually granted a portion of the FOIA request, but only if the Free Press paid $222,667 and waited an estimated three years for legal staff to review the documents, which the city said totaled about 400,000 pages.
Detroit Free Press

Public officials’ private email and text accounts are subject to disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, the Illinois 1st District Appellate Court ruled on Wednesday, upholding a circuit judge’s ruling in a Better Government Association lawsuit against the city of Chicago. “Allowing public officials to shield information from the public’s view merely by using their personal accounts rather than their government-issued ones would be anathema to the purposes of FOIA,” according to the opinion written by Justice Cynthia Cobbs. The BGA sued in 2017 to obtain records that were improperly withheld by the administration of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Cook County Circuit Court Judge Michael Mullen ruled that the city did not conduct a reasonable search for records because its search did not account for emails or texts on employees’ private accounts. Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Law Department appealed that ruling.
Better Government Association
 

 

The judge says to the state police: You didn’t fully follow the law. The police reply: Oh, yes we did. And so the argument continues unresolved — years after a lawsuit was filed contending that the Virginia State Police should release its plan for handling 2017’s deadly rally in Charlottesville and subsequent arguments were made that the plan was overly redacted upon release, thus denying the public a chance to determine what went wrong in that disaster. In fact, the VSP believes that none of the plan should be public. Not a single word. The issue is important because police responses to the Aug. 12, 2017, rally are critical to understanding what went wrong — or right — on that tragic day.
The Daily Progress