Transparency News 3/9/15
Monday, March 9, 2015
State and Local Stories
Top Virginia officials frequently rely on an alternative to one of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged methods of secrecy: Rather than use private emails, governors, university presidents and others hide behind state law. The former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner stepped into a thicket last week over her use of a private account to conduct official business. If she were the elected leader of Virginia or the top executive at one of the state’s public universities, it wouldn’t have mattered. A gaping hole in Virginia’s open records law allows a wide range of public officials — including the governor, the attorney general, mayors and public university presidents — to withhold documents, including emails, under a so-called “working papers” exemption. University of Virginia officials cited that exemption in rejecting open records requests filed by The Daily Progress for school President Teresa A. Sullivan’s emails in the wake of last year’s Rolling Stone scandal. Attempts to reform the law and cut back exemptions have not been very successful, either. State Sen. John Chapman “Chap” Petersen, D-Fairfax, has made multiple attempts to reform the law. Most recently, he tried to roll back the exemption for the presidents of public institutions of higher education. The measure didn’t make it past committee. Transparency advocates such as Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, long have been critics of the law.
Daily Progress
The Navy is retraining sailors who work on its Sea Dragon helicopters after a Virginian-Pilot investigation revealed workers had improperly filled out maintenance records, an apparent violation of naval aviation policy. At least 15 times over the past year, according to records obtained by The Pilot, sailors at Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron 14 failed to properly document their work after taking a part off one helicopter to install on another - a practice known as cannibalization, which the Navy tracks closely and tries to limit. A few sailors at the squadron told The Pilot they had been outspoken at the command about inaccurate record keeping, which they say is more common than what's shown in the documents. They said their concerns were dismissed by maintenance chiefs and quality assurance personnel.
Virginian-Pilot
Just as the Navy base in Dahlgren has a big impact on the communities around it, new homes and businesses around the base—and the traffic they generate—could interfere with the mission of the military installation. Nothing new there. But a Joint Land Use Study, or JLUS, of the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren suggests ways people on both sides of the table can keep each other informed of new projects and plans. Committees working on the JLUS started meeting two years ago, and “we’re just getting to the beginning” of implementation, said Jack Green, King George County’s director of community development. He presented the JLUS last week to the Board of Supervisors, which unanimously adopted the plan.
Free Lance-Star
Salaries for the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors are lower than those of most surrounding counties, according to a survey of neighboring localities by the Danville Register & Bee. Henry, Franklin and Campbell counties pay their supervisors more than those in Pittsylvania, while Halifax County supervisors make the same amount as members of Pittsylvania County’s board. Pittsylvania County’s proposed budget includes raises for the board of supervisors, who would see their annual pay go from $6,000 to $8,400. The chairman’s yearly salary would increase from $7,200 to $12,000. If the board of supervisors approves the proposed raises — which would cost the county $10,335 in 2015-16 — they would go into effect Jan. 1, 2016. Supervisors proposed the idea of a raise at the end of a three-hour finance committee budget work session Feb. 25 in Chatham. Board Chairwoman Brenda Bowman brought up the idea for discussion and Banister Supervisor Jessie Barksdale expressed support. “People who serve in public office, there are so many things you do you’re not reimbursed for and that are done for the health, safety and welfare of citizens,” Barksdale said.
Register & Bee
Dumfries Town Councilman Derrick Wood’s positioning of a campaign sticker during a council meeting was called “an ethical issue or at the minimum inappropriate” by Dumfries Mayor Jerry Foreman. Wood, who is running for the Potomac seat on the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, had a campaign sticker on the back of his laptop during the Feb. 17 town council meeting. The meetings are televised and also available online at the town’s website. During the meeting, when the camera was on Wood, the campaign sticker was visible. “You’ve been a councilmember too long to let this happen inadvertently,” wrote Foreman in an email to Wood. “I need to remind you not to use council meetings or town resources to advance a political agenda for your election to county supervisor.”
InsideNOVA
Warren County won its fifth award in a row for how it presents the budget. The Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada gave the county its Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for the fiscal 2015 spending plan. Jon Munch, president of the Virginia Government Finance Officers Association and finance director for Fauquier County, presented the award to county officials and the Board of Supervisors this week. The GFOA established the award in 1984 with the goal of encouraging state and local governments to deliver high-quality budget presentations, Munch told the board. Reviewers rate the budget for its presentation as a policy document, a financial plan, an operations guide and a communications device. The document must achieve at least a “proficient” rating in all four categories to receive the award.
Northern Virginia Daily
National Stories
Florida's government may have figured out a way to beat climate change: ignore it. A report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting published Sunday details the claims by employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, who say that they were ordered not to use the terms "climate change," "global warming" and "sustainability" in official communications. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel," said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the department from 2008 to 2013. The unwritten policy went into effect shortly after Gov. Rick Scott, a global warming skeptic, took office.
Governing
State Department lawyers will need months to sort through tens of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton's private account and decide which should be kept as part of the official record, a senior department official said, presaging a review that will likely keep the controversy over her messages alive for months. The dispute over Clinton's use of a private email account rather than an official one while she was secretary of State already has generated four days of politically damaging headlines for the likely presidential candidate, as well as embarrassment for the State Department. The review now seems likely to keep the story alive until long after Clinton's formal announcement of her candidacy, expected to take place sometime next month. Another U.S. official described the task of reviewing the messages, primarily in the hands of the State Department's general counsel, as a "big mess."
McClatchy
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says he doesn’t have any emails to turn over to the State Department. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Powell responded to revelations that he used a personal email account, rather than a government one, when he was in charge of the State Department. Questions about his email use arose last week when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account during her tenure. “I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files,” Powell said. “A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and state.gov domain, but I don’t know if the servers in the State Department captured those or not. “
Politico
Editorials/Columns
Information regarding the routes of freight trains carrying petroleum belongs in the public record. The Feb. 24 editorial regarding recent derailments noted that neither railroad companies nor state regulators appear eager to release the details. Virginia officials disclosed the pertinent information only after receiving a request filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The situation underscores the importance of the FOIA. It also suggests that government in its various manifestations fails to embrace the principles the FOIA promotes.
Times-Dispatch
The problem is twofold. One involves national security. As The National Journal put it this week: “Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.” The other involves the Freedom of Information Act, and that’s what we’ll concern ourselves with here today — because the Clinton e-mail controversy offers a cautionary tale for everyone in Virginia who is concerned about their state or local governments, which we hope includes a lot of people. First, a fundamental fact: In Virginia, a public official’s e-mail dealing with “the transaction of public business” constitutes a public record and therefore is subject to the disclosure laws governing public records. There’s no specific law that speaks to e-mail differently from what we now quaintly call “snail mail.” It may seem different, but in the eyes of the law, it’s not; it’s still a public record. The only difference is that in the days of “take a letter, Maria,” a public official might have been more circumspect about what he committed to ink on paper; e-mail lends itself to, well, you know what e-mail sometimes lends itself to.
Roanoke Times
What's troubling, however, is the nation's top diplomat's efforts to host her own email account at her New York home, a "homebrew" system described by The Associated Press and Bloomberg as substantially more at risk of being hacked than commercial systems. It also provided her with substantially more control over which messages ever become available to the public. "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative, or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails," the AP reported. House Republicans are still seeking records as part of their investigation into the assault on a consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2011, that left a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead. In another story, the AP noted the homebrew system "would complicate the State Department's legal responsibilities in finding and turning over official emails in response to any investigations, lawsuits or public records requests.The department would be in the position of accepting Clinton's assurances she was surrendering everything required that was in her control." That's an awful lot of trust to put in any person in government, regardless of which party they're a member.
Virginian-Pilot
In theory, the changeover from paper to email should make government more transparent. The cost of archiving documents should be lower, because data can be housed on relatively small hard drives rather than in spacious warehouses. Likewise, the time expense of retrieving that data should be reduced, because it can be obtained through a few keystrokes rather than a tedious search of file cabinets.
Consequently, open records requests should be far easier to fulfill, because electronic correspondence and memos are keyword searchable. Yet two New York politicos are showing that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government.
David Sirota, Times-Dispatch
If you buy an item, that should give you the right to know everything about it. If you’re looking at a used truck, it makes no sense to be banned from learning about its mileage, the engine and what the interior looks like. Nobody in their right mind would buy a house, sight unseen. So why was it so important for Gov. McAuliffe’s administration to request that the drugs used in state executions be exempt from freedom of information requests? As Sunshine Week approaches, we applaud the Virginia General Assembly for killing this idea and encourage state lawmakers to support more transparency in government, not less. For example, we still don’t know why exactly it was so important to try and get an exemption for execution drugs. Since taxpayers are covering the bill to use them, it only makes sense that we should all be able to see what these drugs are. Who makes the drugs? Is there a direct link to one or more politicians? What’s the status of the contract and is it up for bid? Without access under the Freedom of Information Act, it would be much harder for news organizations and others to review these things.
News Virginian
State and Local Stories
Top Virginia officials frequently rely on an alternative to one of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s alleged methods of secrecy: Rather than use private emails, governors, university presidents and others hide behind state law. The former secretary of state and presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner stepped into a thicket last week over her use of a private account to conduct official business. If she were the elected leader of Virginia or the top executive at one of the state’s public universities, it wouldn’t have mattered. A gaping hole in Virginia’s open records law allows a wide range of public officials — including the governor, the attorney general, mayors and public university presidents — to withhold documents, including emails, under a so-called “working papers” exemption. University of Virginia officials cited that exemption in rejecting open records requests filed by The Daily Progress for school President Teresa A. Sullivan’s emails in the wake of last year’s Rolling Stone scandal. Attempts to reform the law and cut back exemptions have not been very successful, either. State Sen. John Chapman “Chap” Petersen, D-Fairfax, has made multiple attempts to reform the law. Most recently, he tried to roll back the exemption for the presidents of public institutions of higher education. The measure didn’t make it past committee. Transparency advocates such as Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, long have been critics of the law.
Daily Progress
The Navy is retraining sailors who work on its Sea Dragon helicopters after a Virginian-Pilot investigation revealed workers had improperly filled out maintenance records, an apparent violation of naval aviation policy. At least 15 times over the past year, according to records obtained by The Pilot, sailors at Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron 14 failed to properly document their work after taking a part off one helicopter to install on another - a practice known as cannibalization, which the Navy tracks closely and tries to limit. A few sailors at the squadron told The Pilot they had been outspoken at the command about inaccurate record keeping, which they say is more common than what's shown in the documents. They said their concerns were dismissed by maintenance chiefs and quality assurance personnel.
Virginian-Pilot
Just as the Navy base in Dahlgren has a big impact on the communities around it, new homes and businesses around the base—and the traffic they generate—could interfere with the mission of the military installation. Nothing new there. But a Joint Land Use Study, or JLUS, of the Naval Support Facility Dahlgren suggests ways people on both sides of the table can keep each other informed of new projects and plans. Committees working on the JLUS started meeting two years ago, and “we’re just getting to the beginning” of implementation, said Jack Green, King George County’s director of community development. He presented the JLUS last week to the Board of Supervisors, which unanimously adopted the plan.
Free Lance-Star
Salaries for the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors are lower than those of most surrounding counties, according to a survey of neighboring localities by the Danville Register & Bee. Henry, Franklin and Campbell counties pay their supervisors more than those in Pittsylvania, while Halifax County supervisors make the same amount as members of Pittsylvania County’s board. Pittsylvania County’s proposed budget includes raises for the board of supervisors, who would see their annual pay go from $6,000 to $8,400. The chairman’s yearly salary would increase from $7,200 to $12,000. If the board of supervisors approves the proposed raises — which would cost the county $10,335 in 2015-16 — they would go into effect Jan. 1, 2016. Supervisors proposed the idea of a raise at the end of a three-hour finance committee budget work session Feb. 25 in Chatham. Board Chairwoman Brenda Bowman brought up the idea for discussion and Banister Supervisor Jessie Barksdale expressed support. “People who serve in public office, there are so many things you do you’re not reimbursed for and that are done for the health, safety and welfare of citizens,” Barksdale said.
Register & Bee
Dumfries Town Councilman Derrick Wood’s positioning of a campaign sticker during a council meeting was called “an ethical issue or at the minimum inappropriate” by Dumfries Mayor Jerry Foreman. Wood, who is running for the Potomac seat on the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, had a campaign sticker on the back of his laptop during the Feb. 17 town council meeting. The meetings are televised and also available online at the town’s website. During the meeting, when the camera was on Wood, the campaign sticker was visible. “You’ve been a councilmember too long to let this happen inadvertently,” wrote Foreman in an email to Wood. “I need to remind you not to use council meetings or town resources to advance a political agenda for your election to county supervisor.”
InsideNOVA
Warren County won its fifth award in a row for how it presents the budget. The Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada gave the county its Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for the fiscal 2015 spending plan. Jon Munch, president of the Virginia Government Finance Officers Association and finance director for Fauquier County, presented the award to county officials and the Board of Supervisors this week. The GFOA established the award in 1984 with the goal of encouraging state and local governments to deliver high-quality budget presentations, Munch told the board. Reviewers rate the budget for its presentation as a policy document, a financial plan, an operations guide and a communications device. The document must achieve at least a “proficient” rating in all four categories to receive the award.
Northern Virginia Daily
National Stories
Florida's government may have figured out a way to beat climate change: ignore it. A report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting published Sunday details the claims by employees of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, who say that they were ordered not to use the terms "climate change," "global warming" and "sustainability" in official communications. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel," said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the department from 2008 to 2013. The unwritten policy went into effect shortly after Gov. Rick Scott, a global warming skeptic, took office.
Governing
State Department lawyers will need months to sort through tens of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton's private account and decide which should be kept as part of the official record, a senior department official said, presaging a review that will likely keep the controversy over her messages alive for months. The dispute over Clinton's use of a private email account rather than an official one while she was secretary of State already has generated four days of politically damaging headlines for the likely presidential candidate, as well as embarrassment for the State Department. The review now seems likely to keep the story alive until long after Clinton's formal announcement of her candidacy, expected to take place sometime next month. Another U.S. official described the task of reviewing the messages, primarily in the hands of the State Department's general counsel, as a "big mess."
McClatchy
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says he doesn’t have any emails to turn over to the State Department. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Powell responded to revelations that he used a personal email account, rather than a government one, when he was in charge of the State Department. Questions about his email use arose last week when it was disclosed that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account during her tenure. “I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files,” Powell said. “A lot of the emails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and state.gov domain, but I don’t know if the servers in the State Department captured those or not. “
Politico
Editorials/Columns
Information regarding the routes of freight trains carrying petroleum belongs in the public record. The Feb. 24 editorial regarding recent derailments noted that neither railroad companies nor state regulators appear eager to release the details. Virginia officials disclosed the pertinent information only after receiving a request filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The situation underscores the importance of the FOIA. It also suggests that government in its various manifestations fails to embrace the principles the FOIA promotes.
Times-Dispatch
The problem is twofold. One involves national security. As The National Journal put it this week: “Clinton exposed confidential and potentially dangerous information to a nonsecure, commercial email system. She gave Chinese spies a better shot at reading her emails than U.S. taxpayers.” The other involves the Freedom of Information Act, and that’s what we’ll concern ourselves with here today — because the Clinton e-mail controversy offers a cautionary tale for everyone in Virginia who is concerned about their state or local governments, which we hope includes a lot of people. First, a fundamental fact: In Virginia, a public official’s e-mail dealing with “the transaction of public business” constitutes a public record and therefore is subject to the disclosure laws governing public records. There’s no specific law that speaks to e-mail differently from what we now quaintly call “snail mail.” It may seem different, but in the eyes of the law, it’s not; it’s still a public record. The only difference is that in the days of “take a letter, Maria,” a public official might have been more circumspect about what he committed to ink on paper; e-mail lends itself to, well, you know what e-mail sometimes lends itself to.
Roanoke Times
What's troubling, however, is the nation's top diplomat's efforts to host her own email account at her New York home, a "homebrew" system described by The Associated Press and Bloomberg as substantially more at risk of being hacked than commercial systems. It also provided her with substantially more control over which messages ever become available to the public. "Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative, or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails," the AP reported. House Republicans are still seeking records as part of their investigation into the assault on a consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2011, that left a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead. In another story, the AP noted the homebrew system "would complicate the State Department's legal responsibilities in finding and turning over official emails in response to any investigations, lawsuits or public records requests.The department would be in the position of accepting Clinton's assurances she was surrendering everything required that was in her control." That's an awful lot of trust to put in any person in government, regardless of which party they're a member.
Virginian-Pilot
In theory, the changeover from paper to email should make government more transparent. The cost of archiving documents should be lower, because data can be housed on relatively small hard drives rather than in spacious warehouses. Likewise, the time expense of retrieving that data should be reduced, because it can be obtained through a few keystrokes rather than a tedious search of file cabinets.
Consequently, open records requests should be far easier to fulfill, because electronic correspondence and memos are keyword searchable. Yet two New York politicos are showing that the era of Big Data does not necessarily mean the public gets a better view of its government.
David Sirota, Times-Dispatch
If you buy an item, that should give you the right to know everything about it. If you’re looking at a used truck, it makes no sense to be banned from learning about its mileage, the engine and what the interior looks like. Nobody in their right mind would buy a house, sight unseen. So why was it so important for Gov. McAuliffe’s administration to request that the drugs used in state executions be exempt from freedom of information requests? As Sunshine Week approaches, we applaud the Virginia General Assembly for killing this idea and encourage state lawmakers to support more transparency in government, not less. For example, we still don’t know why exactly it was so important to try and get an exemption for execution drugs. Since taxpayers are covering the bill to use them, it only makes sense that we should all be able to see what these drugs are. Who makes the drugs? Is there a direct link to one or more politicians? What’s the status of the contract and is it up for bid? Without access under the Freedom of Information Act, it would be much harder for news organizations and others to review these things.
News Virginian
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