Transparency News 5/11/16

Wednesday, May 11, 2016


State and Local Stories

Martinsville City Councilwoman Sharon Brooks Hodge on Tuesday harshly criticized the council for not having publicly discussed an agreement with the Martinsville-Henry County Economic Development Corp. (EDC) that will enable the city to pay the organization less money in exchange for giving up a seat on its board. "That’s the definition of a back-room deal," Hodge said. Her criticism came after council members, in a unanimous vote, gave final approval to a roughly $89.1 million city budget for the new fiscal year that will begin July 1. Councilman Gene Teague has said he was the councilman involved in the discussion and who presented the proposal to the rest of the council, but he would not disclose the EDC board member’s identity.
Martinsville Bulletin


National Stories

Internal California prison agency records suggest the state might have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy drugs for lethal injection in executions, according to documents released Tuesday by a civil liberties group. Public records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California show that prison officials were busy in 2014 trying to find sources of drugs which many manufacturers have refused to sell to authorities for the purpose of lethal injection.
Los Angeles Times

Missouri lawmakers passed a bill on Tuesday to restrict the public's access to police camera footage, nearly two years after the slaying of a black teen in a St. Louis suburb fueled demands across the country for more police accountability. The measure would block the public from accessing footage collected by cameras worn by officers and mounted inside patrol vehicles while investigations are ongoing. Once an investigation is over, footage would remain restricted if recorded at locations where "one would have a reasonable expectation of privacy," such as inside schools, homes and medical facilities.
Reuters

A federal judge in New Jersey on Tuesday ordered the release of a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the criminal case against two former allies of Republican Governor Chris Christie in a 2013 scandal involving lane closures on the George Washington Bridge. U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton in Newark ruled in favor of several media organizations that sought the list, saying the public interest in seeing names linked to "Bridgegate" outweighed the privacy interests of those named. U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman had opposed the release, citing the potential harm to reputations and privacy, and saying the co-conspirator designation "will become relevant, if at all" only at trial.
Reuters


Editorials/Columns

John Butcher, a local activist and blogger who posts at the Cranky Taxpayer blog, has been complaining for years about mismanagement at Richmond Public Schools.  Recently he stole an idea from a Loudon County activist: use a Freedom of Information Act request to demand SGP, or Student Growth Percentile scores. According to the Virginia Department of Ed, SGP scores try to measure a student's growth since the last time they were measured. Presumably, if a student has a bad SGP score this year, his or her teacher hasn't done very much to help them improve since last year. Loudon's Brian Davison won a huge victory last month, when a Richmond Circuit Court compelled the county's schools district to release the SGP data, anonymized by teacher. Butcher has followed suit, but his request -- and Davison's -- is bringing new legal action from the teacher's union. The Virginia Education Association has apparently filed a request for an injunction against Butcher, Davison, and the VA Dept. of Ed in an effort to block the SGP data. Their concern? According to the injunction petition, "Davison and Butcher have, and intend to, use VDOE's statistical data and reports to make prejudicial judgments about the evaluation, performance, success, or failure of individual teachers."
Richard Meagher Jr., RVA Politics

The libraries have become for me a symbol of what people can accomplish by acting together for the common good. No one person or group gets everything, but everyone gets enough of what they want so that the entire community is served. That is the purpose of government as defined by the United States Constitution.
Michael Ramsey, Roanoke Times
There is a lot of hoopla about the new library opening on Grandin Road. It seems like just a few years ago a new one opened in Roanoke County near Glenvar and, just before that, a big one opened in southwest Roanoke County out on Merriman Road. With each one of these praised openings, I scratch my head and wonder why waste so much money on something that is quickly fading away. With 90 percent of the population having computers and smart phones, there is no longer a need for libraries, so why are we still building them?
James Brown, Roanoke Times