Transparency News 8/3/15

Monday, August 3, 2015

State and Local Stories


In a 4-1 vote earlier this week, the Greene County Board of Supervisors approved a change to its house rules to limit public comments. The vote came after supervisors eliminated the comment period in the wake of “personal attacks, disrespect for others, rudeness or disruptive behavior,” board Chairman David Cox said. The new rules include limiting comments to three minutes, requiring people to sign up before the meeting to comment and giving the board chairman the right to refuse public comments.
Star-Exponent
Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, took issue on Friday with the “matters before the public” rules approved by the Board of Supervisors. “This is the most far-reaching policy that I’ve seen,” she said of the board’s July 28 decision. “I’ve seen some of these individual provisions in many policies across the state, but never put together in one place. The total effect is startling.” Rhyne said that while boards of supervisors can impose some limits on public comments – especially in regard to time, sticking to the subject matter or not being profane – Greene County’s go beyond that.
Greene County Record
Megan Rhyne, Executive Dir of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, talks with Les Sinclairabout the recently adopted Greene County Rules for Public Comment at the Board meetings.
WINA

Virginia will be able to refuse to issue specialty license plates that include images of the Confederate battle flag under a ruling last week by a federal judge. The ruling follows a Supreme Court decision in June affirming that license plates are an official document displaying government-approved information, not an open forum, and as such states are free to reject specialty designs.
Washington Times

Expert architects traveled the globe last week to witness one woman’s creation at Virginia Tech. Around 60 participants of the 18th Congress of the International Union of Women Architects trekked to Blacksburg to get a first-hand view of Tech’s International Archive of Women in Architecture. “There’s nothing else like it,” said Inge Horton, who traveled from San Fransisco. “At some universities they have little collections, but you are never in the company of this many illustrious women.” The more than 400-piece archive, comprising blueprints, books, photos and drafting tools, was the brainchild and passion of former Tech professor of architecture Milka Bliznakov, who died in 2010, said IAWA chair and professor of architecture Donna Dunay.
Roanoke Times


National Stories
​
The State Department released a third batch of highly sought after emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's controversial private email account today. Posted on the State Department's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) website, the collection includes just over 1,300 emails all dated in 2009.
ABC News

A Navy sailor assigned to a nuclear-powered submarine has been accused of using his cellphone to snap revealing photos of the sub’s top-secret inner spaces. Prosecutors say Machinist Mate 1st Class Kristian Saucier took the photos aboard the attack submarine Alexandria, the Navy Times reported Saturday. He has been charged with unauthorized retention of defense information and destroying his laptop and a camera to thwart an FBI probe. The Times said the case against Saucier is the latest in which sailors have been accused of violating the submarine forces’ ban on personal electronic devices. The ban was adopted to prevent sailors from photographing sensitive spaces, the paper said. Late last year the Navy smashed a ring of 12 sailors who allegedly used their cellphones to record female shipmates undressing aboard the sub.
Fox News

In just the first month that net-neutrality regulations have been in effect, consumers have filed about 2,000 complaints to the Federal Communications Commission against Comcast, AT&T, and other Internet service providers, according to records obtained by National Journal. Many consumers complained about data caps—limits that providers place on customers’ monthly Internet usage.
National Journal

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband former President Bill Clinton made almost $28 million last year and paid about $10 million or 36% of that in federal taxes, according to tax returns her campaign released Friday. The Clinton campaign made public eight years of returns — covering 2007 to 2014, essentially filling in the public record since she ran for president unsuccessfully eight years ago. As a result of the earlier campaign and her husband’s political career, the couple’s returns back to 1977 are now public.
Politico

Grand jury records in the Eric Garner case should remain sealed, a New York appellate court ruled on Wednesday. The organizations seeking access to the records — the Legal Aid Society, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Staten Island branch of the NAACP, and the Office of the Public Advocate for New York City—have announced they will continue to fight for the release of the records. The NYCLU and the Public Advocate announced their intentions to appeal the decision to the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York. The other groups are weighing their options. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, joined by 29 other news organizations, had submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to New York’s Appellate Division, Second Department, urging disclosure.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press


Editorials/Columns

If a member of your family is killed, do you have a right to the police report? Most Virginians probably think the answer is obviously yes. In fact, it’s no. Kevin McCarthy found that out the hard way when he asked Virginia Beach officials for a copy of the investigative report on the death of his son, who apparently committed suicide last year. The city turned him down. As the Daily Press in Newport News has reported, “officials say they’re worried that graphic images and information from suicide cases could end up in the media or publicized in a harmful way.” It’s policy, therefore, not to release such information. When the McCarthys’ lawyer asked for a copy of that policy, he was told it’s unwritten. McCarthy is suing to get the records. A similar case is unfolding in Fairfax. In 2009, a Fairfax officer shot and killed 52-year-old David Masters. His father, a retired Army colonel, asked to see the police report. The department refused, just as it refuses to release nearly every police report. Newspapers tend to harp on FOIA, for obvious reasons. But as the McCarthy and Masters cases demonstrate, a tight, muscular FOIA law serves interests far broader than those of the press. The FOIA Council’s review is not focusing on law enforcement this year; earlier examinations found little grounds for consensus. The two cases covered above should spur a second look with a more gimlet eye. Officials should have to clear a high bar to keep relatives in the dark about how their loved ones died.
Times-Dispatch

A few points on the General Assembly's commitment to an open and transparent redistricting process, and transparency in general: The Virginia General Assembly is not subject to the state's Freedom of Information Act, meaning, by law, members can correspond in secret. With the exception of final bill language, there is little legislators, or anyone who works for them, must release to the public. Democrats have filed a pair of federal lawsuits over current Virginia election maps, and Republican legislators have tried to shield emails about that map-making process, claiming attorney-client and legislative privileges. The House Republican Caucus meets in secret just about every day when the General Assembly is in session. So do Republican senators, and Democrats for both chambers. But the House GOP makes up more than two-thirds of the House, which means it's a veto-proof majority, which means that whatever decisions get made behind closed doors, that's pretty well how the majority of the House votes in open session. Bills are killed all the time in Virginia without a public hearing or recorded vote. A study earlier this year found that more than three fourths of the bills that die in the House do so without any record of how members voted. As for the McAuliffe administration's commitment to openness, ask your favorite statehouse reporter (me? right? is it me?) how often it cites the state's broad "working papers exemption" in denying records requests.
Daily Press

Just when you think public officials can’t possibly commit anything more outrageous — then they do. We give you case in point: the Petersburg City Council's refusal to let a man speak at a public forum because he owed an unpaid fine. Last we heard, the First Amendment applied equally to all of us, unpaid fines or not. Linwood Christian sought to speak at the public comment portion of a council meeting back in January. He was told to sit down — and the sole reason given was that he owed an unpaid fine incurred when he ran unsuccessfully for the School Board in 2014. Mr. Christian paid the fine in March. But that’s not the point. The fine or lack thereof should be irrelevant to the right of free speech. The city attorney indicated that Mr. Christian was no longer barred from speaking, but would not guarantee that he or others would not be excluded in the future based on unpaid fines, according to the ACLU.
Daily Progress

Public record laws can be effective news gathering tools and help increase government accountability, but only when government records are properly preserved and maintained. When employees have too much discretion over their own email accounts and determine what to delete and what to retain, and when retention policies include short windows for preservation, these public records laws are severely undermined. Do not let this inhibit freedom information requests, though. If anything, file early and file frequently. While requests may not be answered with as much substantive material as may have been sought or anticipated, making the inquiry and showing an interest in these materials is still important. Ultimately, sunshine laws are only as strong as the underlying records management policies and practices, and spreading awareness helps to fight this limitation.
Kristin Bergman, Poynter