WANTED: SBE audits
For six years there was no word on roughly $172,000 that L. Douglas Wilder had left over from his successful 1989 race to be Virginia’s governor. State law says politicians must report on their campaign finances at least twice a year, but the last report from the Wilder for Governor campaign was dated Jan. 15, 1999, according to State Board of Elections records.
According to Paul Goldman, Wilder’s top political aide and now his senior policy adviser as mayor of Richmond, the account was showing a bank balance of just $3,000,
“My son was filing these (with the SBE). He was supposed to take care of this,” Mayor Wilder said.
The younger Wilder’s management of his father’s political money has already caused him and his father grief. The son was also in charge of his father’s gubernatorial inaugural committee, which ended with a surplus of nearly $1 million and left a controversy that simmered for years. The Internal Revenue Service had argued that the elder Wilder owed taxes on the money.
The dispute was settled in 2000, according to Wilder’s lawyer at the time, without disclosing the terms. That was the same year Wilder’s son pleaded guilty to cocaine possession.
Virginian-Pilot editorial writer Margaret Edds had this to say:
“When the Style Weekly news magazine reported recently that incoming Mayor Douglas Wilder was more than a month overdue filing his latest campaign finance report, Christopher Piper guessed what was coming next. Within days, it did. A reporter called up Piper, the campaign finance administrator for the State Board of Elections, to inquire about finances from Wilder’s 1989 gubernatorial campaign. . .
“Currently, ongoing violations rarely get reported to commonwealth’s attorneys for prosecution. But Piper is devising a system to change that. ‘Within the next year, notices will be regularly sent,’ he promised. That there’s so much room for improvement speaks volumes about the priority Virginia politicians have placed on accurate disclosure of campaign finances. Toothless laws, inadequately enforced, guaranteed that somewhere, sometime, $169,000 would go ‘poof’ in the night.
“The dirty little secret known by many is that the State Board of Elections hasn’t had the resources – or in some cases, the know-how – to monitor compliance. The good news is that both Jerry Kilgore and Tim Kaine advocate audits of campaign disclosure forms.”
Follow the money? How?
House Speaker Bill Howell, former Gov. Jim Gilmore and Gov. Mark Warner all seized on a loophole in state and federal laws allowing secret political contributions to 501c4 nonprofit groups.
Howell created the Virginia Reform Initiative, a nonprofit “think tank” to help shape public policy.
Gilmore formed Americans for Freedom and Opportunity to boost his visibility as an advocate for low taxes and homeland security.
Earlier, Warner created the Foundation for Virginia, to pressure legislators into approving increased taxes to fund schools, colleges and health care.
All three initiatives were funded by secret donors.
“There’s nothing illegal or improper but there are issues of accountability and conflicts of interest,” said Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University.
Frances Hill, a law professor at the University of Miami and an expert on nonprofits, said constitutional protections for free speech and association give advocacy groups some immunity from public scrutiny.
However, she said voters can ask for voluntary disclosures about donors, especially if a nonprofit group becomes overtly political.
“Voluntary disclosure would bolster public confidence that they’re not just looking for a backdoor way to hide special-interest donations,” the Virginian-Pilot said in an editorial. “Some donors may have an ulterior motive. Most probably don’t. But the best way to guard against abuse is to let the public judge.”
Judge gags accused’s parents
A Petersburg-area Juvenile and Relations Court judge issued a gag order against the families of five students charged with sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl. The girl told police she was assaulted on a school bus as it was taking students home on April 22. Parents of the accused had already met with the media after previous court hearings. Acting voluntarily, the media did not report the names of the accused. But the gag order, wrote The Progress-Index, “signals a troubling turn in the case. First and foremost, it is our right to know so that we, the people, may judge the outcome of the case. The Commonwealth’s Attorney, who will prosecute the case, is an elected official, subject to the scrutiny of the voters. Further, the alleged incident occurred on public property. Students and parents must have access to and knowledge of incidents that occur on public property, for obvious reasons. Otherwise, we cease to be a nation where the government serves the people and we become a nation where the people serve the government.”
Va. lags in naming bad docs
Scores of physicians across the country have been given repeated chances to practice, despite well-documented drug and alcohol problems, a Washington Post investigation found.
They have stayed in business with the permission of state medical boards and hospitals, even when many have relapsed multiple times and posed a danger to patients, records show.
In Virginia, where a license can be permanently taken away only with a doctor’s agreement, just one was revoked for substance abuse from 1999 to 2004, records show.
William L. Harp, a physician and executive director of the Virginia Board of Medicine, said he could not comment on specific cases but defended his panel’s record. If the Virginia board is aware of an impaired doctor, he said, it moves swiftly to take action.
911 lawsuit filed
The Bristol Herald Courier filed a lawsuit against the city for refusing to release the tape of a 911 call made by the woman accused of killing her 6-year-old son in April.
City officials said the woman was a “witness” to the crime, and thus entitled to privacy. (We’re not making this up!)
The lawsuit asked that a judge force the city to turn over a copy of the tape and bar police and prosecutors from withholding public records by claiming them as evidence. The case could end up setting a precedent for newspapers and other media outlets around the state, said Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Virginia Press Association.
Buyout disclosed, finally
The Charlottesville School Board insisted it had not held any illegal meetings leading up to the forced ouster of Superintendent Scottie Griffin, but members refused to talk publicly about her buyout contract because, said the board, “a personnel matter cannot be released to the public.”
Oh?
Six weeks later, as required by law, the superintendent’s $291,000 buyout was disclosed. A city councilman had filed a FOIA request to try to learn the amount, and still had to read about it in the paper.
The school board also conceded that minutes from out-of-town retreats had been inadequate, meetings had been poorly recorded or not recorded at all, and major policy decisions had not been adequately discussed with the public.
Legal ads a blackmail weapon?
The Dinwiddie County Board of Supervisors pulled all of the county’s legal advertising from The Dinwiddie Monitor, a weekly newspaper based in the town of Sutherland. Editor Tom Page said the paper “will not be blackmailed” into writing so-called “positive” stories about a board that shoved citizen comments to the end of late night meetings, spent more time behind closed doors than in open public meetings, selected its chairman and vice chairman behind closed doors, and had tried “to censor the only newspaper that will tell the whole story” about the county.
Gobblers fly . . . to Switzerland?
Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors went off to Switzerland for a retreat at its European campus. Board members paid most of their own expenses; six administrators traveled at the university’s expense.
The board said it would not take any formal action during the retreat. Somebody presumably planned to take good notes for citizens who had to skip the meeting.