Transparency News 9/9/15

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

 

State and Local Stories


An independent review of the University of Virginia’s handling of a student’s gang rape allegations, graphically depicted in Rolling Stone magazine and later retracted, will not be publicly released because of student privacy concerns. In an email from the school’s Freedom of Information Act officer late last month, UVa rejected a request from The Associated Press to publicly release an executive summary of the review. The university declined a request for additional comment Tuesday. In its denial, the university cited the explanation a U.S. Department of Education official gave in July to Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring. “We recognize the commonwealth of Virginia’s strong interest in transparency regarding the university’s policies and practices related to sexual assault on campus and showing that the university is not ‘indifferent’ to allegations of sexual assaults,” Dale King, director of the department’s Family Policy Compliance Office, wrote in a letter to Herring. King stressed, however, that the department also has a “strong interest” in the privacy of students and ensuring that they are not discouraged from reporting incidents of “sex-based harassment” because of fears their identities will be revealed. Frank D. LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said the Department of Education typically has applied the federal privacy act too broadly. He said there is no reason the report couldn’t be released with the student’s name redacted.
Daily Progress

Portsmouth City Council members who break the confidentiality of a closed session in Portsmouth will now face penalties including censure, a fine of up to $1,500 and reprimand by a majority vote of the council. The council voted 4-2 Tuesday to amend its rules of order and to prohibit the use of audio or visual recording devices in a closed session. Mayor Kenny Wright said he wanted to fine council members Elizabeth Psimas and Bill Moody and remove Psimas' vice mayoral title because the two spoke to The Pilot after a closed session.
Virginian-Pilot

An audit released Tuesday of nearly $2 billion in city of Richmond financial transactions exposes a lack of internal controls and training that officials say later frustrated efforts to produce a long-overdue annual financial report. The review of about 98,000 payments processed through the city’s disbursement bank account found significant delays in payments to vendors, insufficient and inconsistent documentation, and unrecorded wire transfers. “People go out of business doing what this is doing,” said audit committee Chairman Nick Valdrighi. “We ought to go out of business.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

An independent forensic audit of the city's waste management fund found that former Portsmouth General Services Director Dennis Bagley appropriately purchased nearly $900,000 worth of mulching equipment. Nearly all the invoices from the waste management fund - 589 of 591 - were in line with city policies. However, the audit found that two lacked supportive documentation, said Krista Edoff, CPA for Cherry Bekaert. Edoff also said policies and procedures were followed "for the most part," but problem expenditures arose when "there weren't the appropriate written policies and procedures" in place. She made several recommendations in her audit.
Virginian-Pilot

The Roanoke Police Department has spent nearly a quarter-million dollars to outfit officers with body cameras and expects the bill to climb another $100,000 in the first year. Data retention will be a growing cost. The department will save all video for 45 days under a policy it adopted. That’s 15 days longer than required by the retention and record schedule issued by the Library of Virginia, Chief Chris Perkins noted. That should give anyone who wants to lodge a complaint that might be documented in the video a chance to do so, he said. After that, non-evidentiary video — footage that doesn’t document a crime or behavior that’s the subject of a complaint — will be deleted on a case-by-case basis with the approval of a department captain or higher, Perkins explained. “You can imagine, there’s going to be a lot of cases.” The department will balance its own investigative needs and privacy concerns with demands for the video under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Perkins said. That means any video released under FOIA will be redacted as necessary, including blurring the image of people captured incidentally on video and not part of any crime documented. Any requester will be billed for staff time for redactions, Newman said, and every second of video that requires redaction means two to three minutes of work. In some instances, the department may require a deposit on the costs before complying, he said.
Roanoke Times

Police were called to escort town planning commission member Tom Letts from Tuesday night’s town council meeting after he verbally attacked Mayor Mike Olinger and two other council members during a public forum. Letts, who verbally attacked previous mayor Chip Coleman for a year during public forums, lit in on Olinger the instant he stepped to the podium. He said that he had not been successful in getting the mayor’s emails through Freedom of Information Act requests and wondered aloud whether or not Olinger was “held to the same standards” as other public officials.
Free Lance-Star

National Stories
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A day after Hillary Clinton said she wouldn’t apologize for using a personal email server during her tenure as secretary of State, she appeared to do just that in an interview with ABC News. “That was a mistake,” she said. “I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility.” In a Monday interview with the Associated Press, Clinton said she wouldn’t apologize because “what I did was allowed. It was allowed by the State Department. The State Department has confirmed that. I did not send or receive any information marked classified. I take the responsibilities of handling classified materials very seriously and did so.” In the ABC interview on Tuesday, Clinton repeated that she did not send or receive classified material on the private account and that she is “trying to be as transparent as I possibly can” about her actions.
USA TODAY

If you work with data, you've heard the three-letter initialism before. If you don't, you've almost certainly seen others reference them in the context of powering data visualizations or listed as a source in an investigative report. In any case, one can't help but suspect their importance, but many may still be wondering: What exactly are APIs? Why are they such valuable tools? This post will provide a basic introduction to APIs, using a practical example to clarify what they are, how simple it is to use them and why it's so essential for anybody who works with data to become comfortable using them.
Sunlight Foundation

It is difficult to turn to Twitter, or read the newspaper if you are still so inclined, without being bombarded with stories of management failures and performance shortfalls at all levels of government. At the federal level, serious failures have triggered scandals in agencies as diverse as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Office of Personnel Management and even the Secret Service. The feds are by no means alone. Writing for Governing earlier this year, Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene highlighted six major management challenges facing states and localities this year that can apply to federal agencies as well: cybersecurity, replacing retiring baby boomers, managing big data, catching up on deferred maintenance, overseeing private contractors and making transparency work. How can those of us in public management change this discouraging equation? We should borrow a page from the advocacy community and start keeping score of agency management in a very visible, publicly compelling way. Scorekeeping and public report cards have many salutary effects. They can educate citizens about services they rely on and achieve greater mobilization around governance issues. But most importantly, they can prod public leaders to improve operations and services. Thus, when the United Kingdom began publicizing the on-time performance of trains at train stations, the timeliness of the British rail system improved markedly.
Governing


Editorials/Columns

Anyone hoping the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control would deviate from the law-enforcement norm and give the public a candid accounting of the Martese Johnson incident can keep on hoping. That apparently applies to Johnson’s lawyer, too. State officials have refused to release the report on the incident, and sometimes claimed — erroneously or mendaciously — that state law forbids them to. It doesn’t. Johnson’s lawyer, Daniel Watkins, says he has asked for the report several times, but has been stonewalled. He was allowed to examine it for about 90 minutes and make notes. But throwing him a crumb or two is no substitute for full disclosure. Thanks to a famous Supreme Court case, citizens who are arrested have the right to remain silent. State agencies do not. To the contrary, they have an obligation to divulge even embarrassing information to the people who pay their bills. Right now, the people who do so are wondering what the ABC is trying to hide.
Richmond Times-Dispatch