Transparency News 7/16/14
State and Local Stories
The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors has begun mulling a pay increase for the supervisors in 2016.The board’s Finance, Government Services and Operations Committee on Tuesday called for a staff analysis of the compensation levels of the supervisors and other paid boards and commissions. The panel asked staff members to look at comparable jurisdictions and report back with options for adjusting compensation levels based on population and cost of living.
Washington Post
Former Gov. Bob McDonnell’s legal defense fund raised $92,894 in the second quarter, down from $149,242 in the year’s first three months. The Restoration Fund spent $21,470 in legal services in the second quarter, compared with $140,600 in the previous quarter, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan tracker of money in state politics.
Times-Dispatch
Democrat Andrew P. Miller, a former state attorney general, has written U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director James Comey to question the federal investigation into the resignation of state Sen. Phillip P. Puckett, D-Russell. Puckett stepped down abruptly last month, handing Republicans control of the state Senate at a pivotal point in the debate over the state budget and Medicaid expansion. Nothing that has been reported in the media “suggests that any criminal activity has occurred,” writes Miller, who served as attorney general from 1970 to 1977.
Times-Dispatch
It took almost 15 months for Portsmouth City Auditor Jesse Andre Thomas to produce an audit plan for the City Council. And when he did, it looked a lot like documents he'd received from the Chesapeake auditor's staff just days before - on the same day The Virginian-Pilot published an investigative report into his lack of productivity. Councilwoman Elizabeth Psimas reviewed the documents from Portsmouth and Chesapeake, provided by The Pilot, and said she would take up the issue with other council members. To compare them, Psimas said, she highlighted in pink the sections that were similar or identical. "And my paper is very pink," she said.
Virginian-Pilot
Norfolk Citizens for an Elected School Board gathered enough signatures to add a referendum question to the November ballot.
Virginian-Pilot
Orange County officials have unveiled a new Internet site that allows residents to access information from property information and zoning to locations of historical sites and wetlands. The Orange County Planning and Zoning Department’s new geographic information system site, available through the county’s main website, provides mapped information including tax parcels, topography, floodplain, zoning and county-operated facilities.
Daily Progress
The state agency that manages responses to natural disasters has a little bit of an internal disaster to manage itself. The Virginia Department of Emergency Management has a pervasive internal fiscal management problem, allowing staff to make questionable use of their fuel charge cards, poorly control petty cash funds, and even spend way more than double the agency’s fiscal 2013 budget, according to a new state audit.
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
National Stories
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission pushed back to July 18 the first deadline to submit comments on the agency’s proposed new Internet traffic rules after a surge in traffic overwhelmed its online filing system. Companies, consumer advocates, lawmakers and citizens had sent nearly 680,000 comments on the FCC’s proposed so-called net neutrality rules — which guide how Internet service providers manage web traffic on their networks — as the deadline for first comments approached.Reuters
The United States' Department of State Freedom of Information Act has said that the public disclosure of emails by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, during his time with the agency, "could cause an unwarranted invasion of persdonal private",according to a report on The Desk website. A letter dated 1 July by chief FOIA officer, Pamela Phillips, responding to a FOIA request by Matthew Keys of The Desk, said that: "Records pertaining to Mr. Snowden are withheld pursuant to the seventh exemption of the FOIA ... which protects from disclosure records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes. "This includes information that, if released, could interfere with enforcement proceedings, could cause an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, could reveal the identities of confidential sources, or would reveal law enforcement techniques and procedures," said Phillips in the letter.
ZDNet
An atheist will deliver the first non-religious invocation at a town board meeting in Greece, New York, on Tuesday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the town's practice of opening its meetings with a Christian prayer was constitutional.
Reuters
