Transparency News 5/27/16
State and Local Stories
There are seats available for a two-hour FOIA course by the FOIA Council’s Maria Everett at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy. More information below:
Contact Al Ogelsby, Accreditation/Curriculum Manager at the NVCJTA
aoglesby@nvcja.org
The new safety commission that Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia are setting up to oversee the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority won’t be subject to any of those jurisdictions’ public records laws, at least according to a draft of the compact released Wednesday. Rather, the Metrorail Safety Commission, intended to replace an existing Tri-State Oversight Committee that has been dubbed ineffective by the federal government in the face of the system’s frequent safety and service failings, is directed to adopt its own policies using the federal Freedom of Information Act as a guide.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Richmond city officials pushed back against a TV news report Thursday that suggested $28.6 million “had gone missing from city finances,” saying the story showed a misunderstanding of basic accounting principles. “You have those who are not professionals in accounting making mistakes in reporting information out to the public,” Selena Cuffee-Glenn, the city’s chief administrative officer, told members of Richmond City Council’s government operations committee. The committee members asked for an explanation after local news station WWBT, the local NBC affiliate, published a report that said “an air of crisis and a multi-million dollar miasma now pervades parts of City Hall, after an internal report obtained by NBC12 details how $28.6 million is missing from Richmond city coffers.” After hearing the administration’s explanation, the three council members present Thursday — Jonathan T. Baliles, Cynthia I. Newbille and Charles R. Samuels — said the matter did not appear to be a cause for concern, though Baliles and Samuels said they would follow up to make sure documentation the administration said it would provide backs up the explanation they were provided.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
National Stories
Hillary Clinton and her advisers have offered a series of explanations over the last year for her decision to use a private email server as secretary of state, a decision that she said again on Thursday had been “a mistake.” She did not want the inconvenience of carrying two phones, Mrs. Clinton said initially. She did not want a government account that might pull in nonwork matters, she said later. Or perhaps, an adviser has said, she simply did not want Republican lawmakers rifling through her personal emails. Yet another explanation emerged Thursday: She was not comfortable with using a computer to read email.
New York Times
Bills for an outside legal firm to represent the Michigan governor in civil lawsuits related to the Flint drinking water crisis are costing taxpayers close to $6,500 a day, and the governor spent almost the entire $400,000 allocated for the legal contract in February and March alone, records show. Barris, Sott, Denn & Driker of Detroit, hired to represent Gov. Rick Snyder in connection with a raft of Flint civil lawsuits in which he is named as a defendant, billed the state $343,702 between Feb. 8, when the firm started work, and March 31, according to records obtained by the Detroit Free Press under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act.
Detroit Free Press
Current and former intelligence community employees (as well as some other government employees) are obliged to submit their writings for official review prior to publication in order to screen them for classified information. This is often an onerous, time-consuming and frustrating process. It sometimes appears to authors to be conducted in bad faith. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has instructed the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a new, IC-wide pre-publication review policy that will "yield timely, reasoned, and impartial decisions that are subject to appeal." In its new report on the FY2017 intelligence authorization act, the Committee said it "is concerned that current and former IC personnel have published written material without completing mandatory pre-publication review procedures or have rejected changes required by the review process, resulting in the publication of classified information."
Secrecy News
Editorials/Columns
Sometimes you get news that makes your head hurt, such as when you learn that the state of Virginia got an overall grade of D in the most recent rankings by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan investigative news organization founded in 1989 to focus on "abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust." Then there are the times you get more news that makes you want to pound your aching head on the table in despair, such as when you learn that our miserable grades for public integrity are actually better than most states. That overall D reflects a score of 55 out of 100. A D seems charitable for a score of 55 percent, but it actually placed Virginia in the top third of the country.
Daily Press
