Transparency News 9/22/14
State and Local Stories
The Virginia Retirement System's chief investment officer and its former chief, who is now second in command, werethe state's highest-paid employees last year, according to a list of salaries compiled by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. VRS Chief Investment Officer Ronald D. Schmitz tops the list, with $786,596 in cash compensation thanks to a hefty bonus. And former CIO Charles W. Grant, now director of internal asset management, earned $670,811. The state salary list, which details the compensation of 104,722 state employees, doesn't account for the often-seven-figure sums paid to high-profile college coaches from sources other than state coffers.
Times-Dispatch
Lost in the partisan debates in Richmond over issues including Medicaid expansion and programs for the commonwealth’s less fortunate is a disturbing fact about Virginia’s working poor. Thousands of them are state employees. The number of full-time state employees receiving federal assistance has increased more than 150 percent — from 892 in 2011 to 2,287 in 2013, according to statistics compiled by the state Department of Human Resources Management.
Times-Dispatch
2013-14 salary database
In an amended pleading filed on Tuesday, former Public Schools Motorsports Academy Instructor William C. “Buddy” Wilborn claims Halifax County Public School Superintendent Dr. Merle Herndon violated state law when she attended an executive session on June 2 convened to consider Wilborn’s termination. Wilborn was excluded from that session, according to the suit. At the conclusion of that session and without holding a further evidentiary hearing, the school board voted to terminate Wilborn’s contract. “This is relative to personnel, and I have no comment,” said Herndon when contacted Thursday about Wilborn’s amended pleading.
Gazette-Virginian
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National Stories
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (or AO) has a plan to restore online access to documents that were controversially removed in August from PACER, the online system for accessing public court records, a spokesperson said. ”The Administrative Office is working to restore electronic access to these cases by converting the docket sheets in these cases to PDF format which will allow us to make them available in PACER,” said David Sellers, assistant director for public affairs at the AO, in a statement to the Washington Post.Washington Post
News organizations are asking a judge to allow one video camera and one still photographer in the courtroom during the Colorado theater shootings trial, but prosecutors and the defense object. The judge will hear arguments today. Attorneys for news organizations including The Associated Press say cameras would improve public access to an important trial and wouldn't be disruptive. Prosecutors say victims would be subjected to unwanted and hurtful attention and that witnesses might change the way they behave.
New York Times
Editorials/Columns
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) announced on Friday that it would make reams of court records once again accessible through PACER, the federal courts' digital warehouse for its court files. Many advocates are cheering this decision. But we are not. It's a big missed opportunity to provide free access to this trove of court records.David Greene, Electronic Frontier Foundation
State Police claimed that “because the arresting officers chose not to print out copies of the photographs, they were not records in the possession of State Police and therefore were not subject to release by the agency.” Possession may be widely referred to as 9/10 of the law, but it isn’t the sum total of FOIA. It’s as though State Police took printed copies of the photographs, chose to store them in a folder that’s exempt from disclosure, and are now contending that it’d be illegal to go into the folder to get them out again to copy and produce them. That’s nonsense, and, more importantly, it doesn’t even appear to be a plausible reading of the pertinent statutes.
Open Virginia Law
The devastating scandal at Norfolk's Community Services Board ended in secret last week, as it began. On Tuesday, the city said a settlement had been reached in a defamation lawsuit by four former CSB employees against the agency's former director. That lawsuit was settled last week, and any explanations for the bungled case remain secret, frustrating taxpayers and advocates for good government. "The parties and their counsel agree that the matter is closed and will not be making any further comments," said Deputy City Attorney Jack Cloud, in an email statement. If those represent the final words in the CSB scandal, the city will have turned its back on justice, and the matter will continue to fester.
Virginian-Pilot
Portsmouth's leaders know that 17 months is too long to pay someone for producing no original work. Fourteen months was too long. But when the City Council reviewed the performance of City Auditor Jesse Andre Thomas in June, it gave him 90 more days to provide evidence that he was an effective watchdog over Portsmouth's finances. That 90 days is up. There's been no indication of any audit completed, large or small. Since hiring him in April 2013, Portsmouth has paid Thomas $131,325, plus benefits, and received very little. The Pilot's Tim Eberly first reported in June that Thomas - the city's first auditor, hired to find waste and make the city run more efficiently - had given the City Council a summary of his work: an incomplete audit of Willett Hall and a review of a contract with a hotel. Eberly's Freedom of Information Act requests produced scant evidence that Thomas had done anything else. In the auditor's first 14 months, he had logged in to Portsmouth's financial system only twice, and both logins occurred within two weeks of his starting date, city records show.
Virginian-Pilot
At least twice, the commission has been the subject of high-level state studies that raised questions about whether it’s really using its money wisely. In 2008, a blue ribbon panel (we know it was blue-ribbon because that was the title) led by former Gov. Gerald Baliles studied the commission and made 22 recommendations. Only eight were carried out. The commission resisted an audit by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, the state’s auditing arm. One got done anyway. In 2011, that audit came to the same conclusions: The commission has too many members (mostly politicians) and spends too much time doling out money without really knowing what it will get in return. Only 11 percent of the projects could even be measured. Essentially, the politicians on the tobacco commission have treated it as a giant pork barrel, from which politicians can dish out goodies that make them look good back home. Some good may have come out of it, but how do we really know?
Roanoke Times
Virginia’s political scandals come at longer intervals than corruption busts in other states. Perhaps our politics are cleaner than most and, just as true, perhaps ethics laws are harder to break when the sky is the limit for many gifts and the self-reporting process is a bit vague and infrequent. It should not take a federal prosecutor, judge and jury to define corruption in Virginia, but recently that has been the case, which may prompt state lawmakers to pass some new ethics laws with teeth. Clearly the gap between national anti-corruption laws and Virginia’s laissez-faire standards of “let them police themselves, self-report a little once in a while, and hope for the best” needs to be closed. Consider the following ethical lapses of the 1980s and the past decade.
Bob Gibson, Roanoke Times
The more transparent and open governments can be, the better for everyone. To most people, transparency has to do with disclosure. Providing information about an issue, event, project, policy, program etc. and then providing a way for people to find and view that information. Typically, that would suffice. However, when the term is applied in our system of government that particular definition does not go far enough to meet the public’s (expected) definition of transparency. In a democratic government, transparency should be defined as disclosure and discussion.
E. Alan Anstine, Star-Exponent
