Monday
March 6, 2023
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state & local news stories
VCOG’s annual conference
FOI Day — March 16
Charlottesville
Info and registration here
It’s a little-known perk of serving in the General Assembly. Every senator and delegate gets a city-issued permit that lets them park for free and ignore time limits during the legislative session What’s happening: As part of a semi-regular feature we’re calling FOIA Friday, we asked the city for records related to the program. What we learned: There are limits to the city’s parking amnesty for lawmakers, and it can get awkward when lawmakers run afoul of those rules. The passes come with a list of instructions — mostly obvious stuff like not parking on sidewalks or in handicapped spaces. The intrigue: Del. Alfonso Lopez, D-Arlington, appears to be the only lawmaker to have broken those rules this year when he left his car in the floating rush-hour lane on Franklin Street. Lopez said in a text to Axios that something came up, and he wasn’t able to move his car in the morning, but he says he didn’t seek out any special treatment.
Axios Richmond
The recently confirmed University of Virginia Board of Visitors member who disparaged administrators and student groups in a series of text messages published by the Washington Post has apologized. Bert Ellis addressed himself as the “elephant in the room” at the board’s Friday meeting, its last of the academic year and Ellis’ first as a confirmed board member. “To all my colleagues, I offer my apology,” Ellis said. “Those were private and confidential messages but were still out of place. I am emotional and I have the occasion to do things that I would never expect to be on the front page of the Washington Post.” Ellis and other board members were aware that their private correspondences regarding the university could be requested and published. At the current board’s first meeting in August of last year, which Ellis was present for though not yet confirmed, the board was provided an overview on the status of UVa academics, sports, finances and health system – in addition to a presentation on board member responsibilities. As part of that presentation, they were told the Freedom of Information Act requires board members turn over electronic mentions of UVa, the Board of Visitors and any subsidiary of the university if anyone from the public requests them. “I have learned my lesson about FOIA,” Ellis told the board on Friday. “I can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so all I can say is I’m sorry.”
The Daily Progress
The Virginia Attorney General’s Office has asked the Loudoun County Circuit Court to subpoena the independent report into how Loudon County Public Schools handled repeated sexual assaults in high schools in 2021, which the School Board has voted to keep secret in its entirety. Special Counsel to the Attorney General Theo Stamos wrote the report is “material to criminal charges that are now pending” against former superintendent Scott Ziegler. She wrote if the division tries to claim the report is protected under attorney-client or work-product privilege, she asks the court to force the division to turn over the report to be examined in private by the court to see if those privileges apply. “LCPS bears the burden to ‘establish that the attorney-client relationship existed, that the communications under consideration are privileged, and that the privilege was not waived,’” her motion reads.
Loudoun Now
stories of national interest
“No one wants to look like they’re voting to expose judges to harm, though, so the bills fly through with only a handful of no votes”
Richard T. Griffiths of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation asked Georgia legislators this week to take a deep breath, tap the brakes, and reconsider the “vast sweep” of Senate Bill 215, which would require redaction of names and property ownership from state data bases of law enforcement personnel, politicians, and hundreds of thousands of other government officials. The campaign against government records transparency is a growing trend in states across the country. Lawmakers didn’t slow down, and the legislation sponsored by Sen. Matt Brass, a Newnan Republican, swept through the Senate with a 53-0 vote Thursday with no debate. It is now headed to the House which could sign off on the bill in the coming weeks, an alarming development for transparency advocates. Added Megan Rhyne of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, “These bills attack one small piece of the problem since there are multiple sources for the same information. No one wants to look like they’re voting to expose judges to harm, though, so the bills fly through with only a handful of no votes.”
Georgia Recorder
Steven Spielberg says the U.S. government is hiding info about UFOs from you and everyone else in the country. The ‘E.T.’ director was blunt on ‘The Late Show’ with Stephen Colbert … “I think the secrecy that is shrouding all of these sightings and the lack of transparency until the Freedom of Information Act compels certain materials to be released publicly, I think that there is something going on that simply needs extraordinary due diligence.”
TMZ
editorials & columns
“The U.S. has an overclassification problem, which, experts say, ironically threatens the nation’s security.”
The U.S. faces far more threats to its national security than from spy balloons or classified documents discovered in former and current presidents’ homes. About 50 million more threats every year. That’s the estimated number of records annually classified as confidential, secret or top secret by the U.S. government. The U.S. has an overclassification problem, which, experts say, ironically threatens the nation’s security. Those in the intelligence field, along with at least eight special commissions through the decades, acknowledge the security risk of nearly 2,000 workers processing tens of millions of classified records each year, which could be viewed and potentially leaked or misplaced by more than 4.2 million government employees and contractors who have access to them. I have seen the secrecy creep – more classification and more withholding of information by the government – growing for decades, as a scholar who studies freedom of information, as recent president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and as incoming director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida.
David Cuillier, Yahoo!