Woodrum, Maroney join VCOG’s board
Former Del. Clifton A. “Chip” Woodrum has joined VCOG as a member of
its board of directors. He accepted the appointment after retiring from the legislature
in early January.
The Roanoke lawyer was awarded one of 13 at-large seats on the recently expanded VCOG board. (Ten other directors are designated by the Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Association of Broadcasters, VCOG’s principal funding partners.)
Woodrum chaired a two-year legislative study in 1998-2000. It led to a FOIA overhaul, creation of the state’s FOI Advisory Council and appointment of a full-time FOI ombudsman.
Throughout the past decade, Democrats and Republicans alike regarded him as the General Assembly’s leading authority on access law.
Jeff Shapiro, Times-Dispatch columnist, wrote that Woodrum was “frolicking to the last (as) the clown prince of House Democrats. Tweaking Attorney General Jerry Kilgore for a delayed opinion on (closed caucuses), Woodrum, who turned 65 last July — when he sought the ruling — said . . .he’d waited so long, he was now eligible for Social Security and Medicare’.”
Peter Maroney, vice president and general manager, WTVR-TV, Richmond, recently was appointed to a VCOG seat to succeed Randy Smith, president, WSET-TV, Lynchburg.
Dave Cupp, VCOG’s vice president and a long-time Charlottesville broadcaster, recently announced he will be leaving WVIR-TV to join his wife, who is teaching at Harvard.
VCOG’s other board members are: Paul McMasters, president, First Amendment ombudsman, Freedom Forum; Ed Jones, secretary, editor, Free-Lance Star, Fredericksburg; Harry Hammitt, treasurer, editor/publisher, Access Reports, Lynchburg; Dorothy Abernathy, Richmond bureau chief, Associated Press; Lucy Dalglish, executive director, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Arlington; Cy Dillon, librarian, Ferrum College; John Edwards, publisher/editor, The Times, Smithfield; Mark Grunewald, professor of law, Washington & Lee University, Lexington; Douglas Henderson, director, Loudoun County Library System; Wat Hopkins, associate professor, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg; Connie Houston, former president, Va. League of Women Voters, Vienna; Jack Kennedy, clerk of courts, Wise County/City of Norton; Marvin L. Lake, public editor, Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk; Lawrence McConnell, publisher, Daily Progress, Charlottesville; John Moen, general manager, WFLS, Fredericksburg; Robert M. O’Neil, founding director, Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, Charlottesville; Matt Paxton IV, publisher, The News-Gazette, Lexington; Don Richards, vice president and general manager, WWBT-TV, Richmond; Ham Smith, W&L professor and chair, Journalism/Mass Communications Department; Rod Smolla, dean, School of Law, University of Richmond.
Ex-officio members are Peter Easter, executive director, Virginia Broadcasters Association, and Ginger Stanley, executive manager, Virginia Press Association.
Edwards/Hopkins named to Va. FOI Council again
John Edwards, a founding director of VCOG, recently was reappointed to the
Freedom of Information Advisory Council.
Edwards is publisher/editor of The Smithfield Times, a member of the VCOG board and a former president of the state press association.
The Senate Rules Committee named him to a new four-year term.
The following week, the Speaker of the House renamed Virginia Tech communications processor Wat Hopkins to another four-year term as well. Hopkins, too, serves on the coalition’s board of directors.
Earlier, Gov. Mark Warner named David Hallock to the council. Hallock served on the council as a private attorney in 2000-2001
Hallock succeeds coalition member Rosanna Bencoach. Bencoach, an appointee of then-Gov. Jim Gilmore, is manager of the policy division at the State Board of Elections
Coalition welcomes 2004 summer intern
Albert Sheng, who just completed his first year at the Marshall-Wythe School
of Law at William and Mary, is this summer’s Richardson Fellow.
Albert graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in political
science and statistics in 2003.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Albert is also well-versed in Web site development
and database maintenance.
Among the projects Albert will be working on this summer are a redesign of the coalition’s Web site, which includes both technical and substantive changes to the home page, and a survey of public records retention acts across the country.
Albert also contributed stories for this issue of NEWS.
We are fortunate to have such a competent, conscientious and affable person working with us this summer.
VCOG Web site I
Thanks to a $5,500 grant approved in May by the National Freedom of Information
Coalition, VCOG will be redesigning its Web site and adding new Internet features
to aid citizen access.
Funding for the NFOIC grant was provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Journalists honor the late Jay Pace
Jay Malcolm Pace III, the late editor/publisher of the Ashland Herald-Progress,
has been awarded posthumously the George Mason Award for outstanding contributions
to Virginia journalism.
Pace died in the spring [after a brief illness]. He was 58.
During his tenure, the Herald-Progress won numerous awards for excellence and trained scores of young journalists.
He was president of the Virginia Press Association in 1992-93, and was a founding director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
Directors update “Core Principles”
Virginia’s Coalition for Open Government is guided by its “Core Principles,” first
adopted at the Coalition’s founding in 1996. The policy guidelines were
recently updated to include an explicit reference to electronic communications
and public meetings:
• Citizen access to public information, and citizen participation in
the affairs of governmental bodies, should be ensured by restricting such access
only within narrow and carefully defined exceptions to the First Amendment
and to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
• FOIA disclosure rules must be liberally construed; open-record and open-meeting
exemptions, whether permitted by FOIA exceptions or mandated by other provisions
of the state constitution or laws, must be narrowly construed.
• Access to public records must be provided on a timely basis and, whenever
feasible, in the format requested by a citizen.
• Record access should be provided at little or no cost to the citizen.
Any fees generated by conversion of the record to a form not mandated by law
should not exceed the actual costs for search time and copying. Search fees should
be capped at the hourly rate for the lowest classification of employee capable
of conducting such a search.
• Electronic storage or “outsourcing” of data collection and retrieval
do not alter the basic nature of public records, and thus must not be used to
circumvent these open-government principles.
• As required by law, public bodies must provide for timely, affordable
access in the planning, design and procurement of electronic data-storage and
processing systems. Frequently requested records, including timely reports of
key agency and committee deliberations, should routinely be provided online.
• Electronic mail dealing with public business must be treated as public
records, and should be prominently posted at easily accessible sites. At the
very least, communications relating to public business by a quorum (if fewer
than three) or among three or more public officials, by means of electronic chat
rooms, listservs, or other instant messaging services, must be subject to traditional
rules for public meetings.
• Government should not assert a proprietary interest in using or disseminating
public information. Copyright or other forms of intellectual property protection
may not be used to evade the need for maximum disclosure of public records.
• Where the gathering or dissemination of information has historically been
a private sector function, government should not use its power or resources — much
less its legal sanctions — to displace or supplant private information providers.
• Privacy is best protected by strictly limiting government agencies to
collection of that confidential personal information for which they have an absolute
need and clearly articulated use. Data systems should be designed to facilitate
redaction, and redaction must occur whenever a record contains non-public information,
to ensure maximum dissemination of public information. Social security numbers,
bank-account numbers and credit-card information should be fully or partially
removed from all public records.
ALA honors Va. librarian for Gilmore records fight
Nolan T. Yelich, state librarian of Virginia, has been named the 2004 winner
of the John Phillip Immroth Memorial Award for Intellectual Freedom, presented
by the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Round Table.
The Immroth Award honors intellectual freedom fighters who have demonstrated remarkable personal courage in resisting censorship. The award consists of $500 and a citation.
The Immroth Award Committee chose Yelich for his courageous and victorious stand in defense of freedom of information in Virginia. For several months he vigorously and publicly pursued the complete records of former Virginia Governor James Gilmore’s administration for the state archives of Virginia.
“Nolan Yelich demonstrated steadfast leadership in protecting and preserving the public interest by upholding state law,” said Chair Sylvia Turchyn. “With his thoroughly professional yet insistent pursuit of public information, Yelich sets an excellent standard for other state librarians faced with increasing refusals by elected government officials to surrender papers for archival preservation and access by the citizenry.”