Transparency News 8/10/16

 

Legislative leaders plan two hearings to allow the University of Virginia to explain its $2.2 billion investment fund that has rankled some members of the General Assembly. House Appropriations Chairman S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, said Tuesday that he has invited the university to make a presentation on the Strategic Investment Fund to his committee on Sept. 19. After the state Auditor of Public Accounts has completed its report on the fund, a joint meeting of the higher-education subcommittees for the House and Senate money committees also will hold a hearing, he said. Other legislators Monday sent another letter to President Teresa A. Sullivan and Rector William H. Goodwin Jr. seeking more details and reminding them that under state code, “the rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia shall be at all times subject to the control of the General Assembly.” U.Va. replied with a statement that the university “is confident that these reviews will demonstrate how seriously the board and administration take their fiduciary responsibilities and our commitment to transparency in our financial reporting.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Portsmouth Councilman Bill Moody said he had asked City Attorney Solomon Ashby that a discussion of the housing authority board’s performance be included in a motion to go into closed meeting Tuesday. No such topic was included in the motion. Mayor Kenny Wright tried to deter the council from discussing the issue during Tuesday’s closed meeting, according to emails among the council and Ashby that were provided to The Pilot. Wright maintained that the council shouldn’t take any actions until, as he put it, an “investigation” was completed. He did not specify what the investigation was about or who was being investigated. In earlier emails to council members, Ashby wrote he had spoken with Verbena Askew, one of the Housing Authority’s attorneys, and “she advises there is a pending criminal investigation.” “Mayor Wright has expressed some concern about placing the matter on a closed session motion,” Ashby wrote. “He is requesting that Council members contact him concerning this matter prior to it being placed on a closed session motion.” Reached by phone Tuesday, Askew said she suggested to the city attorney that council members shouldn’t take any action against the authority’s board because of a criminal investigation.
Virginian-Pilot

A Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday there were not enough valid signatures collected in an effort to recall Portsmouth Mayor Kenny Wright. In all, organizers delivered 8,530 signatures. But Registrar Deloris Overton Short deemed only 6,012 valid, and Circuit Judge James Hawks said they needed 7,786.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
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A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied. The State Department turned the new emails over to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act.
New York Times

It is easy to look at the data-driven management successes of place like Chicago or New York and conclude that the sophisticated application of data analytics requires the urban scale and resources of a big city. The story of Jackson, Miss., population 173,514, and its dramatic ramp-up of the use of data use to tackle the city's problems in the past year belies this assumption.
Governing


Editorials/Columns


The Office of State Inspector General is one of the most crucial departments in Virginia's government. It's the investigatory agency that the commonwealth's citizens authorize to get to the bottom of incompetence, malfeasance — and worse — in state government. As such, it's imperative that citizens have absolute confidence in its integrity. But we aren't all that confident right now. It's disturbing that state officials — from the Inspector General's office to the attorney general's office to the governor's office — seem averse to holding conversations to get to bottom of what happened to Mr. Mitchell. That officials in Gov. Terry McAuliffe's office didn't bother to speak to the complainants is unacceptable. Does this speak to an eagerness to clear people rather than find the truth?
Daily Press

In the early days of the republic, Alexander Hamilton was George Washington’s treasury secretary and was busy building the young nation’s new financial system. Hamilton was a Federalist and had certain views about how the nation’s finances should work. The Republicans in Congress  had very different views. We have no need today to get into what those differences were. Instead, we merely need to look at what happened in 1793. The congressional Republicans were convinced Hamilton was up to no good (he wasn’t, at least not in a criminal way) and decided on January 23 of that year to pepper the treasury secretary with demands for information on the government’s finances. The Republicans were “planning to exhaust Hamilton,” Chernow writes. “By design, these resolutions made massive, nay overwhelming demands on Hamilton.” Even more deviously, “the House gave Hamilton an impossible March 3 deadline. Republicans hoped that Hamilton’s failure to comply would then be construed as prime facie evidence of his guilt.” As Chernow writes: “Hamilton’s critics seriously underrated his superhuman stamina. He enjoyed beating his enemies at their own game. … By February 19, in a staggering display of diligence, he delivered to the House several copious reports, garlanded with tables, lists and statistics that gave a comprehensive overview of his work. … The upshot of the abortive Republican campaign was an almost total vindication of Hamilton.” With that historical lesson behind us, we turn now to a similar situation playing out between the University of Virginia and state legislators. The university says it submitted “a 10-page narrative response and a separate 16-page executive summary,” along with “nearly 2,000 pages of records, including more than 1,000 pages of email records in response to the legislative inquiry.” In a blistering letter on Monday, DeSteph — joined now by 10 other legislators, from both parties — fired back to explain why that isn’t good enough. They complain that many of the emails provided lacked the attachments they were referencing. We don’t know how this will turn out, or should turn out. But we do know this: Jefferson’s university could follow Hamilton’s example and give the legislators all the information they asked for — and more.
Roanoke Times