Transparency News 3/21/16
State and Local Stories
A bipartisan group of Virginia senators wants the state Supreme Court to clarify a legislative privilege, allowing them to communicate with outside consultants in secret. The argument stems from an ongoing case targeting Virginia's House of Delegates map. OneVirginia2021 sued last September, arguing that 11 districts are so heavily gerrymandered that they violate the Virginia Constitution. As part of the discovery process, the group's legal team, including former Republican House member Wyatt Durrette, asked for communications between legislators and third parties who helped with the map-drawing process. Both sides agree that Virginia law protects communications between legislators, their assistants and the attorney general's office, but this coalition of state senators argues that privilege extends to outside consultants as well.
Daily Press
The Supreme Court today takes up a long-running political fight about whether Virginia lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map to protect the commonwealth’s lone African-American congressman — or to make sure he was not joined by a second. The court will consider whether Republican lawmakers packed African-American voters into Democratic Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott’s 3rd District to comply with the Voting Rights Act or to make surrounding districts more hospitable to white candidates. A lower court ruled against the legislature last year, and the judges then created a second district designed for a black candidate. Voters in the state’s congressional primary go to the polls in June — about when the justices would seem likely to rule on this new plan.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
J.J. “Joe” Bahen calls them “right-turn traps,” and for more than a year, he has had one at Elkhardt Road and Hull Street Road in South Richmond in his sights. Bahen’s attempts to get detailed violation information from various localities that use the cameras or are considering deploying them, including Richmond and Virginia Beach, have raised questions about the accessibility of data not maintained by a government agency but by a contractor, Redflex. At various points, both the Virginia Beach and the Richmond police departments told him he would be required to pay Redflex hundreds of dollars before he could get the information. “Anyone in that office with a working knowledge of Excel would have been able to honor those requests in 15 minutes. That’s how they do their special reports,” Bahen said. “They want us to go to Redflex and pay an exorbitant fee when the data is readily available to the staff at the police departments.” Victoria Pearson, general counsel for Richmond police, said some of the information requested by Bahen is “very technical and not maintained by RPD, since they pertain to actual operation of the cameras and the cameras are at all times the property of Redflex.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
If you live in Hampton Roads and want to attend your mayor’s official annual address, you’ll have to get your wallet out. State of the city speeches, in which mayors lay out visions of their communities’ futures, are held before paying crowds at Chamber of Commerce-hosted luncheons. In the five South Hampton Roads cities, if you’re not a chamber member, a ticket will cost you $65 to $75. Members pay $45 to $55. Open-government advocates said having the chamber host a paid mayoral address sends a bad message and raises concerns about public access.
Virginian-Pilot
John Rowe, who is running for mayor of Portsmouth in November, accepted a $500 campaign contribution that one of his competitors is questioning. Rowe received the contribution from Councilman Bill Moody on March 3, the night he announced his candidacy. Mayoral candidate Shannon Glover’s spokesman, Jim Ross, questioned whether it is permissible. In a video taken by The Virginian-Pilot at Rowe’s campaign kick-off, Moody mentions the owner of Guads Mexican Restaurant “passing the hat” in relation to the $500 contribution. Virginia prohibits anonymous contributions, no matter the size, said Elizabeth Howard, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Elections. In a pass-the-hat scenario, contributors’ names would not be written down because people would place money into a hat, according to the department’s Summary of Laws and Policies Candidate Campaign Committees. “Anonymous contributions are illegal; therefore, ‘pass the hat’ type fundraisers are also illegal,” the document says.
Virginian-Pilot
You'll seldom find a city manager or county administrator who will say he or she got into the business of public sector management for the paycheck. Many will say they do it for the satisfaction of public service and that they probably don't get paid for the number of hours they put in. A Daily Press review found every city manager and county administrator in the Peninsula area will make more than $100,000 in salary this year. Most will make north of $150,000 and get thousands more in additional compensation. Experts say the explanations for what specific localities pay can vary wildly, including whether the candidate was promoted from within or hired from outside, whether they came from a public executive job or the private sector, and whether they were hired for a specific focus.
Daily Press
National Stories
The Obama administration set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists and others that despite searching they couldn't find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a new Associated Press analysis of government data. In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Such cases contributed to an alarming measurement: People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record. In the first full year after President Barack Obama's election, that figure was only 65 percent of cases.
AllGov
A newly filed Freedom of Information Act lawsuit is demanding that the federal government fork over records from the investigations that led to former Central Intelligence Agency Director Gen. David Petraeus' guilty plea last year to a charge of mishandling classified information. The suit, filed Friday in federal court in Washington by Daily Beast reporter Shane Harris and a pro-transparency organization, the James Madison Project, seeks information from three federal agencies — the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the CIA.
Politico
The CIA cannot hide behind the excuse that a researcher's request for all of its files on Nelson Mandela is overbroad to dodge a lawsuit against it, a federal judge ruled Thursday. In 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Ryan Shapiro sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI looking for records mentioning former South African President Nelson Mandela, hoping to learn if the United States had a role in Mandela's 1962 arrest and imprisonment. The CIA and NSA blocked his requests, with the CIA claiming the search would be "unreasonably burdensome" and the NSA refusing to confirm or deny the existence of Mandela-related records, a move known as a Glomar response. Shapiro filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014, claiming the agencies violated the Freedom of Information Act in skipping over his request.
Courthouse News Service
The group has been a fierce advocate for transparency, regularly championing investigations that rely on public documents to hold government officials accountable. But over the past year, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge-based advocacy group that represents thousands of scientists around the country, has campaigned to limit the scrutiny of scientists who work for public universities and agencies through public records requests. These scientists, the group says, are increasingly being harassed by ideological foes who seek to unearth documents that would derail or sully their work with evidence of bias. But the group’s efforts have sparked tensions with other open-government advocates, who have argued that it risks opening loopholes that could make it easier for officials and agencies to hide information from the public. “It’s just gibberish to say these laws stifle research,” said David Cuillier, director of the University of Arizona School of Journalism and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists’s freedom of information committee. “These are government scientists funded by taxpayers, and the public is entitled to see what they’re working on.”
Boston Globe
Editorials/Columns
Here’s a two-question test for you: Question 1: Are government employees and public officials (a) always trying to hide something, or (b) of the purest hearts and noblest of actions? Question 2: Is the “public” (a) always trying to stir up trouble, or (b) of the purest hearts and noblest of actions?
Megan Rhyne, Richmond Times-Dispatch
I’m writing this column because today ends Sunshine Week, a national initiative promoting open government and freedom of information. This issue has become even more acute with the drastic cuts to staffs at newspapers and other media organizations in the past decade and a half. Fewer reporters are left to cover issues from zoning to ethics, police conduct to neighborhood services. Every now and then, the right thing happens. Suffolk Mayor Linda Johnson this week credited my columnist colleague, Kerry Dougherty, for getting her to change how a panhandling ordinance would be debated. Kerry had interviewed the mayor on why the council planned to discuss the issue in closed session. It was a “great conversation,” Johnson said at the end of Wednesday night’s council meeting. “It felt right and good” to hold the discussion in open session, which happened that night. “I never thought I’d thank Kerry Dougherty for starting those wheels turning.” So should we all.
Roger Chesley, Virginian-Pilot
As legal strategies go, it’s unusual: Seven current and former Virginia senators are asking a Richmond judge to declare them in contempt for refusing to surrender snail-mail, email, telephone records and internal documents to a redistricting reform group that is seeking to overturn state legislative boundaries as an illegal scheme to eliminate two-party competition. The bipartisan organization suspects the senators have something to hide — that on a thumb drive or in a manila folder, there’s a smoking gun. In pleadings in Richmond Circuit Court earlier this month, the senators — four Democrats and two Republicans, most from contested districts, and Senate Democratic Leader Dick Saslaw of Fairfax County — say they shouldn’t have to give up anything; that some of the material subject to subpoena is sensitive and that all of it is protected from disclosure by a legal concept President Richard Nixon made famous during the Watergate scandal four decades ago: official privilege. In other words, that the constitution — in this instance, Virginia’s — provides members of the General Assembly an absolute right against questioning in legal proceedings because it could divert their attention from their public duties. This privilege can apply as well to legislators’ communications. More than 40 states enshrine in their constitutions privilege for public officials.
Jeff Schapiro, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Three months in and we’re almost nostalgic for the controversies of the old Prince William County school board -- the 12th high school’s new pool, the moving of old graves, the Justice Department probe into boundaries. All of it pales in comparison to what we’re dealing with now: impulsively changing the name of a 45-year-old middle school without public input, racial epithets placed in school board member Justin Wilk’s mailbox and daily ugliness spread across social media. There’s been a big outcry against the Godwin name change from the community. And there’s an unsavory racial undertone to it all. All of this controversy could have been avoided if the school board had simply taken Wilk’s suggestion for renaming Godwin, vetted it properly and put it on a later meeting agenda, with plenty of time for public input.
Inside NOVA
Too many elected boards seek every opportunity to meet out of sight of the public they serve. Some schedule executive sessions as a regular agenda item. Some hold up to three executive sessions in a single meeting. Some have executive sessions that last longer than the open portion of their meeting. In most cases, executive sessions do not violate open meeting laws. The closed-door discussions often are suggested or encouraged by an elected board’s legal counsel. But legality and necessity are two different things. Consider the following list our Fourth Estate counsel to county commissions, city councils, and school boards everywhere on executive sessions and general government openness. Citizens should hold their elected officials to the standards below. They are the Ten Commandments for Open Meetings:
Brian Hunhoff, Herald Courier
