Transparency News 8/1/16

 

At 9:01 p.m. last Tuesday, an email blast went out to those on the city of Petersburg’s mailing list, giving notice of a special meeting by the City Council the next day. Less than 24 hours later, the council debated and approved a real estate deal that will flush $1.3 million into the city’s empty coffers. Just half a dozen residents, mostly regulars concerned with the city’s mismanagement of finances, crammed into the tiny mayor’s conference room on the second floor of City Hall, with more waiting in the hallway. With standing room only for just a handful of people around the conference table where council members were seated, it was an unusual setting for a vote on a controversial proposal to redevelop three city-owned properties into affordable housing for veterans. The gathering, which ended in less than 30 minutes, was the latest in a series of council meetings scheduled on short notice, many of them at small venues and often at odd hours, testing the flexibility of residents who want to attend.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Kevin Whaley took to YouTube to air his grievances this spring. Though still employed as an assistant chief medical examiner in Richmond, Whaley tossed caution aside and did what most unhappy employees would never entertain: He took the scorched earth approach. Once his bosses discovered the scathing 20-minute video in which Whaley accused his agency of wide-ranging malfeasance, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia put the 10-year veteran on leave and later initiated two investigations into the allegations. Whaley declined an interview request for this story. But in an email Tuesday, he wrote that he was “exhausted and frustrated but not surprised” by the investigation’s findings, which he described as a combination of “semantics and outright lies.”
Virginian-Pilot

The Virginia State Police investigation that Mayor Dwight C. Jones invited of his administration in January following an audit critical of his public works director is nearing resolution, officials said Friday. A state police spokeswoman declined to comment this week as the investigation entered its seventh month, but Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael N. Herring said that authorities hope “to issue findings before the fall.” It was not immediately clear when the work — a joint effort of the state police, city auditor’s office and Herring’s office — will be complete. The results of the review will be made public, but authorities have not determined whether they will seek any indictments in the case, Herring said.
Richmond Times-Dispatch


National Stories
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A federal appeals court struck two major blows for transparency Friday in a Freedom of Information Act case involving records of misconduct allegations leveled at immigration judges. A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the identities of immigration judges accused of misconduct could not be categorically deleted from records made public under the Freedom of Information Act. The court also ruled that when producing email chains and similar records under FOIA, agencies cannot redact information solely on the basis that it appears to be nonresponsive to the subject of a request.
Politico

A year after updating its open data policy, New York City is pushing ahead with plans to automatically refresh more of its data sets and tie public records requests to the open data process — moves hailed by open government advocates, even as some worry about the data’s quality.
State Scoop

The free-speech watchdog FIRE is a familiar irritant to college administrators, but until this past year, the rest of the country wasn’t paying much attention. An “epic” year is what Greg Lukianoff, president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, calls it. Colleges and universities were forced to publicly and painfully deal with a confluence of national issues — race, sexual assault, gay rights, politically correct speech — mirrored and magnified in the microcosm of campus life. Finally, FIRE’s activism was syncing with the zeitgeist, in part because of Mr. Lukianoff’s role in framing the public interpretation of the campus turmoil. It was Mr. Lukianoff who made the argument, in a widely read opinion piece in The Atlantic, that today’s students are “coddled” and demanding protections against offensive words and ideas at the expense of intellectual rigor and the First Amendment. It was also Mr. Lukianoff who happened to be at Yale during the infamous Halloween costume shout-down of Prof. Nicholas Christakis, and whose viral video of it appeared to vividly illustrate his observations that many college students don’t understand what freedom of speech is, and who it applies to. Freedom of speech, he said, is not an “intuitive” concept, and Americans take its benefits for granted.
New York Times

Editorials/Columns

There seems to be some consensus that the death of Jamycheal Mitchell, the 24-year-old found dead in his cell at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in August, resulted from a catastrophic bureaucratic failure, a series of mistakes made by a number of actors operating on behalf of several agencies. That conclusion may not be wrong. Honestly, no one really knows. (Or if they do, they’re not letting the public in on it.) However, that explanation lends itself to the relatively comforting idea that Mitchell’s death was an aberration, an all-but-impossible calamity that befell one young man and could only be replicated under the most unlikely of scenarios. In fact, there is precious little evidence to support such a conclusion. That’s because every investigation has been incomplete, dogged by unanswered questions or kept from public view.
Virginian-Pilot

By now, many Virginians are aware of an excess $2.3 billion at UVa that’s been called a “slush fund, “unfound money,” and “the $2.3 billion cover-up.” Whatever the label, UVa now admits it accumulated massive surpluses in an account labeled “University Operating Funds” that has generated unbudgeted investment returns of $700 million since 2009.  It has yet to share a record of the specific dollar balances being part of any public deliberation, and admits that only a handful of current members—less than a quarter of the board—may have generically discussed the operating fund years before formal action was requested in 2016. Materials circulated days in advance clearly indicated that plans for how to spend the fund were to be discussed out of public earshot. Having learned valuable lessons in 2012 and made sincere promises of transparency, I raised concerns about the legitimacy of excluding the public. Still, the matter was taken up in private. It quickly became apparent that the board was about to be asked to rubber-stamp yet another proposal that, if publicly discussed, might upset the academic applecart. Knowing what was at stake, I met with Attorney General Mark Herring and was told by his office that the closed meeting conversation went “far astray” of Virginia’s open meetings laws.
Helen Dragas, Roanoke Times

This month, the U.S. Freedom of Information Act turned 50. But the passage of time has not slowed the pace of threads toward it and, transitively, toward the American public. A mere 10 days after the FOIA’s semicentennial, a federal appeals court in a close ruling reversed 20-year-old precedent allowing the release of police booking photos. The Sixth Circuit court held that such photos are “embarrassing and humiliating” and thus meet the standard of privacy-protected information that the FOIA exempts. The appeals to personal shaming do not quite get to the heart of the matter and the reason the press uses these images. Yes, they are useful in selling papers and generating web traffic, but they also provide valuable information to the public. Not everyone knows the names of their neighbors, coworkers or those whom they might meet on the street. The publication of police mugshots gives all news readers and viewers an opportunity to identify potential threats in their neighborhoods, whether they be sex offenders, serial drunken drivers or the violence-prone. The court has foisted upon the press the burden of proving that public interest.
The (Norwich) Bulletin