Transparency News 7/20/16
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
State and Local Stories
The FOIA Council's subcommittee on records will meet today in the General Assembly Building at 10:30. Here is the link to the agenda: http://foiacouncil.dls.virginia.gov/subcom_mtgs/2016/ag072016recs.pdf
The Supreme Court of Virginia may be divided on whether a group of Republican legislators and voters can challenge Gov. Terry McAuliffe's blanket restoration of voting rights for felons, but the justices appear to have little patience with the governor's decision to withhold a list of more than 206,000 felons covered by his decision. Justice William C. Mims suggested that McAuliffe's refusal to release the list could affect the court's decision on whether House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, and four other Republican voters have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the order the governor signed April 22. "The governor's failure to produce that public document may be the fulcrum on which standing turns," Mims told Solicitor General Stuart A. Raphael, who defended McAuliffe's action as his prerogative under the Virginia Constitution.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
A case that could recalibrate what documents state legislators can keep secret was heard Tuesday in the Supreme Court of Virginia. Vesilind v. Virginia State Board of Elections is primarily a redistricting case, brought to challenge 11 General Assembly districts under the state constitution. But a side issue has gotten four state senators, and two former ones, held in contempt of court by a Richmond Circuit Court judge. That was the issue before the Supreme Court Tuesday: Whether the Virginia Constitution allows state legislators to withhold emails and other documents, even when they're subpoenaed in a lawsuit. The privilege decision could have longer-reaching affects, though, setting new precedent statewide. It's unlikely to affect what documents are available to the public through Virginia's Freedom of Information Act, though, because that's a separate section of the law.
Daily Press
In an apparent first for the Board of Supervisors—and an alleged violation of the Freedom of Information Act—Supervisor Tony R. Buffington (R-Blue Ridge) lobbied his fellow supervisors from afar by text message Monday evening during a Transportation and Land Use Committee meeting. Buffington, who works for the Capitol Police and is in Cleveland for work, texted other supervisors during a meeting of the board’s Transportation and Land Use Committee to oppose an application by Harris Teeter Properties LLC to increase the commercial footprint of a development to include three drive-through restaurants and a gas station. Harris Teeter was asking the county to make the application for the three drive-through restaurants inactive, removing them from the board’s considerations.
Loudoun Now
Upon reviewing a series of text messages between Supervisor Tony Buffington (R-Blue Ridge) and members of Transportation and Land Use Committee about a land use application, Loudoun County Attorney Leo Rogers has found the messages did not violate Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act. The county said in a statement that Rogers had reviewed all text messages and video from Friday's meeting, spoke to board members as well as with the attorney for the Virginia FOIA Council [and the] Virginia Coalition for Open Government regarding his determination. After discussion, both state entities agreed the text message exchange did not constitute a FOIA violation. “[G]iven that the text messages were exchanged between only two Board members, there was no participation in the meeting itself. A public meeting of the county’s elected body is defined under FOIA as a meeting of three or more Board members,” the county’s statement read. “Second, in order to be an electronic communication under FOIA, there needs to be an audio or visual component, which the text messages did not include.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
Portsmouth’s general registrar has until Aug. 8 to check nearly 8,200 signatures collected in a petition to recall Mayor Kenny Wright. Circuit Judge James Hawks set the deadline and a date for the hearing, which will be held at 10 a.m. on Aug. 9, to determine whether the petition is sufficient to hold a recall election. The recall effort, led by Portsmouth resident and Norfolk businessman Robert Marcus, needs at least 7,786 signatures, leaving a buffer of about 400 based on the estimate of how many were gathered.
Virginian-Pilot
Records obtained by state legislators — and passed on to The Daily Progress — shed new light on a controversial investment fund established by the University of Virginia earlier this year. First, they take issue with the way it was established. The legislators also suspect the university used lines of credit opened to help it get through financial difficulties to bolster the investment fund. Finally, legislators want to know why officials went into closed executive session when talking about the fund at last month’s Board of Visitors meeting. Officials cited the personnel exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, according to the minutes from that meeting. The exemption allows officials to discuss the “assignment, appointment, promotion, performance, demotion, salaries, disciplining or resignation of specific public officers, appointees or employees of any public body.”
Daily Progress
Tackling a county budget may seem daunting, but Smart Cville tactfully lays out Albemarle’s budget in a spread of colors with its new budget visualization tool that illustrates how your money helps the county. Smart Cville, a locally based nonprofit, aims to open up data, plain and simple. Creator Lucas Ames, 35, sent out a letter in mid-April requesting that Charlottesville adopt an open data resolution. In mid-June, the mayor convened a meeting to discuss open data as the city continues its work to further improve open-data relations between city legislatures and citizens. “One of the reasons we are most excited about this visualization launch is that it provides the community with a good example of how citizen innovators can use technology to help solve public problems,” says Ames. “If we think back 15 or 20 years, citizens simply did not have the tools to engage with their communities in this way.”
C-Ville
A group of local investors has acquired the Fauquier Times, Prince William Times and affiliated newspapers, magazines and websites from the Virginia News Group. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The investment group, Piedmont Media LLC, is comprised of a group of residents from across Fauquier County, according to a news release from the group. “Our goal is a newspaper that is as good and as honest and as able as are the people of Fauquier County,” said Piedmont Media chairman George R. Thompson. The first edition under the new ownership will be Aug. 24.
Inside NOVA
A judge has given federal investigators the OK to search former BVU Authority executive Stacey Pomrenke’s personal email account. Magistrate Judge Pamela Meade Sargent this week approved a search warrant request for Pomrenke’s Google email account but imposed conditions designed to protect attorney-client and marital privilege. Authorities say they are looking for evidence of potential obstruction of justice, witness tampering and contempt of court.
Herald Courier
National Stories
The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case brought by an open-government activist who contends that the public should be allowed to view electronic data and metadata kept by local government agencies. In summer 2013, John Paff requested a log of the emails sent by the Galloway Township police chief and the township clerk during a two-week period in June 2013, and then sued in an Ocean County court when his request was denied. A judge in 2014 ordered that the information be released to Paff, the chairman of the New Jersey Libertarian Party's Open Government Advocacy Project. The town's IT specialist had testified at the hearing, before Superior Court Judge Nelson C. Johnson, that retrieving the data would take about "two to three minutes," depending on the volume of emails that the search turned up. The data would include the sender, recipient, date, and subject. The 2014 ruling was reversed by an appeals panel in March 2016. The panel decided the log was off-limits because the clerk would have to create a record that did not already exist. The state Open Public Records Act (OPRA) only requires the release of records, not information or data, the panel said.
Philadelphia Inquirer
The Michigan House of Representatives in June stopped publishing a monthly list of legislative staffers, their titles and salaries online. That list has been replaced with a more general salary list that includes titles and salary levels but no names. Representative salaries are also listed. Asked what prompted the change Gideon D'Assandro, a spokesperson for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, said the listing was causing problems. "The short answer is that posting people's private financial information on the web caused problems for our staff," D'Assandro said. "We found very few people really used the list of specific salaries for individual staffers, except for prospective employers who wanted to poach our staff and lowball them while doing it. It ended up hurting a lot of staffers trying to get their careers started and also created a sometimes difficult professional environment for people who worked here," D'Assandro said.
MLive
Editorials/Columns
Every year, members of the General Assembly consider proposals to change state law about public notices, which must be published in the local newspaper of record. Some local governments argue they could save money if they were allowed to post notices on their websites instead. It’s a bad idea, principally because it would reduce the transparency of local governments and make it harder for citizens to stay informed. Just look at what happened during a recent meeting of a Freedom of Information Act Council subcommittee. The committee was considering a proposal that would require localities to post public notices on their websites within three days of their final approval. But as the Virginia Coalition for Open Government reports, “local government representatives worried about smaller localities without the ability to quickly or easily access their websites.” State lawmakers should sit up and take notice. If they allow localities to publish their own notices, they will hand over control from parties with an interest in public disclosure to the localities with little or no interest in public disclosure. That is a recipe for mischief — and worse.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In Virginia, if you are a governor and don't feel like handing over what's clearly been an astonishingly slovenly done list of ex-felons covered by your blanket restoration of civil rights, your answer is simple — and wrong: Yep, still a working paper. And, therefore, still secret under Virginia's over-broad shield for government ineptitude, our Freedom of Information Act. Consider: What FOIA says is that working papers are "records prepared by or for" any of that extremely long list of shielded public officials for their "personal or deliberative use." The language feels overly broad, extended beyond what's reasonable — a bit like the protection given to records of active police investigations in most states being extended in Virginia to shield all police investigations, even completed ones. It's the law's way of saying: "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along."
Daily Press
State and Local Stories
The FOIA Council's subcommittee on records will meet today in the General Assembly Building at 10:30. Here is the link to the agenda: http://foiacouncil.dls.virginia.gov/subcom_mtgs/2016/ag072016recs.pdf
The Supreme Court of Virginia may be divided on whether a group of Republican legislators and voters can challenge Gov. Terry McAuliffe's blanket restoration of voting rights for felons, but the justices appear to have little patience with the governor's decision to withhold a list of more than 206,000 felons covered by his decision. Justice William C. Mims suggested that McAuliffe's refusal to release the list could affect the court's decision on whether House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, and four other Republican voters have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the order the governor signed April 22. "The governor's failure to produce that public document may be the fulcrum on which standing turns," Mims told Solicitor General Stuart A. Raphael, who defended McAuliffe's action as his prerogative under the Virginia Constitution.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
A case that could recalibrate what documents state legislators can keep secret was heard Tuesday in the Supreme Court of Virginia. Vesilind v. Virginia State Board of Elections is primarily a redistricting case, brought to challenge 11 General Assembly districts under the state constitution. But a side issue has gotten four state senators, and two former ones, held in contempt of court by a Richmond Circuit Court judge. That was the issue before the Supreme Court Tuesday: Whether the Virginia Constitution allows state legislators to withhold emails and other documents, even when they're subpoenaed in a lawsuit. The privilege decision could have longer-reaching affects, though, setting new precedent statewide. It's unlikely to affect what documents are available to the public through Virginia's Freedom of Information Act, though, because that's a separate section of the law.
Daily Press
In an apparent first for the Board of Supervisors—and an alleged violation of the Freedom of Information Act—Supervisor Tony R. Buffington (R-Blue Ridge) lobbied his fellow supervisors from afar by text message Monday evening during a Transportation and Land Use Committee meeting. Buffington, who works for the Capitol Police and is in Cleveland for work, texted other supervisors during a meeting of the board’s Transportation and Land Use Committee to oppose an application by Harris Teeter Properties LLC to increase the commercial footprint of a development to include three drive-through restaurants and a gas station. Harris Teeter was asking the county to make the application for the three drive-through restaurants inactive, removing them from the board’s considerations.
Loudoun Now
Upon reviewing a series of text messages between Supervisor Tony Buffington (R-Blue Ridge) and members of Transportation and Land Use Committee about a land use application, Loudoun County Attorney Leo Rogers has found the messages did not violate Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act. The county said in a statement that Rogers had reviewed all text messages and video from Friday's meeting, spoke to board members as well as with the attorney for the Virginia FOIA Council [and the] Virginia Coalition for Open Government regarding his determination. After discussion, both state entities agreed the text message exchange did not constitute a FOIA violation. “[G]iven that the text messages were exchanged between only two Board members, there was no participation in the meeting itself. A public meeting of the county’s elected body is defined under FOIA as a meeting of three or more Board members,” the county’s statement read. “Second, in order to be an electronic communication under FOIA, there needs to be an audio or visual component, which the text messages did not include.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
Portsmouth’s general registrar has until Aug. 8 to check nearly 8,200 signatures collected in a petition to recall Mayor Kenny Wright. Circuit Judge James Hawks set the deadline and a date for the hearing, which will be held at 10 a.m. on Aug. 9, to determine whether the petition is sufficient to hold a recall election. The recall effort, led by Portsmouth resident and Norfolk businessman Robert Marcus, needs at least 7,786 signatures, leaving a buffer of about 400 based on the estimate of how many were gathered.
Virginian-Pilot
Records obtained by state legislators — and passed on to The Daily Progress — shed new light on a controversial investment fund established by the University of Virginia earlier this year. First, they take issue with the way it was established. The legislators also suspect the university used lines of credit opened to help it get through financial difficulties to bolster the investment fund. Finally, legislators want to know why officials went into closed executive session when talking about the fund at last month’s Board of Visitors meeting. Officials cited the personnel exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, according to the minutes from that meeting. The exemption allows officials to discuss the “assignment, appointment, promotion, performance, demotion, salaries, disciplining or resignation of specific public officers, appointees or employees of any public body.”
Daily Progress
Tackling a county budget may seem daunting, but Smart Cville tactfully lays out Albemarle’s budget in a spread of colors with its new budget visualization tool that illustrates how your money helps the county. Smart Cville, a locally based nonprofit, aims to open up data, plain and simple. Creator Lucas Ames, 35, sent out a letter in mid-April requesting that Charlottesville adopt an open data resolution. In mid-June, the mayor convened a meeting to discuss open data as the city continues its work to further improve open-data relations between city legislatures and citizens. “One of the reasons we are most excited about this visualization launch is that it provides the community with a good example of how citizen innovators can use technology to help solve public problems,” says Ames. “If we think back 15 or 20 years, citizens simply did not have the tools to engage with their communities in this way.”
C-Ville
A group of local investors has acquired the Fauquier Times, Prince William Times and affiliated newspapers, magazines and websites from the Virginia News Group. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The investment group, Piedmont Media LLC, is comprised of a group of residents from across Fauquier County, according to a news release from the group. “Our goal is a newspaper that is as good and as honest and as able as are the people of Fauquier County,” said Piedmont Media chairman George R. Thompson. The first edition under the new ownership will be Aug. 24.
Inside NOVA
A judge has given federal investigators the OK to search former BVU Authority executive Stacey Pomrenke’s personal email account. Magistrate Judge Pamela Meade Sargent this week approved a search warrant request for Pomrenke’s Google email account but imposed conditions designed to protect attorney-client and marital privilege. Authorities say they are looking for evidence of potential obstruction of justice, witness tampering and contempt of court.
Herald Courier
National Stories
The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case brought by an open-government activist who contends that the public should be allowed to view electronic data and metadata kept by local government agencies. In summer 2013, John Paff requested a log of the emails sent by the Galloway Township police chief and the township clerk during a two-week period in June 2013, and then sued in an Ocean County court when his request was denied. A judge in 2014 ordered that the information be released to Paff, the chairman of the New Jersey Libertarian Party's Open Government Advocacy Project. The town's IT specialist had testified at the hearing, before Superior Court Judge Nelson C. Johnson, that retrieving the data would take about "two to three minutes," depending on the volume of emails that the search turned up. The data would include the sender, recipient, date, and subject. The 2014 ruling was reversed by an appeals panel in March 2016. The panel decided the log was off-limits because the clerk would have to create a record that did not already exist. The state Open Public Records Act (OPRA) only requires the release of records, not information or data, the panel said.
Philadelphia Inquirer
The Michigan House of Representatives in June stopped publishing a monthly list of legislative staffers, their titles and salaries online. That list has been replaced with a more general salary list that includes titles and salary levels but no names. Representative salaries are also listed. Asked what prompted the change Gideon D'Assandro, a spokesperson for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, said the listing was causing problems. "The short answer is that posting people's private financial information on the web caused problems for our staff," D'Assandro said. "We found very few people really used the list of specific salaries for individual staffers, except for prospective employers who wanted to poach our staff and lowball them while doing it. It ended up hurting a lot of staffers trying to get their careers started and also created a sometimes difficult professional environment for people who worked here," D'Assandro said.
MLive
Editorials/Columns
Every year, members of the General Assembly consider proposals to change state law about public notices, which must be published in the local newspaper of record. Some local governments argue they could save money if they were allowed to post notices on their websites instead. It’s a bad idea, principally because it would reduce the transparency of local governments and make it harder for citizens to stay informed. Just look at what happened during a recent meeting of a Freedom of Information Act Council subcommittee. The committee was considering a proposal that would require localities to post public notices on their websites within three days of their final approval. But as the Virginia Coalition for Open Government reports, “local government representatives worried about smaller localities without the ability to quickly or easily access their websites.” State lawmakers should sit up and take notice. If they allow localities to publish their own notices, they will hand over control from parties with an interest in public disclosure to the localities with little or no interest in public disclosure. That is a recipe for mischief — and worse.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In Virginia, if you are a governor and don't feel like handing over what's clearly been an astonishingly slovenly done list of ex-felons covered by your blanket restoration of civil rights, your answer is simple — and wrong: Yep, still a working paper. And, therefore, still secret under Virginia's over-broad shield for government ineptitude, our Freedom of Information Act. Consider: What FOIA says is that working papers are "records prepared by or for" any of that extremely long list of shielded public officials for their "personal or deliberative use." The language feels overly broad, extended beyond what's reasonable — a bit like the protection given to records of active police investigations in most states being extended in Virginia to shield all police investigations, even completed ones. It's the law's way of saying: "Nothing to see here, folks. Move along."
Daily Press
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