Transparency News 12/9/16
Friday, December 9, 2016
State and Local Stories
A few shots from yesterday's conference at James Madison's Montpelier.
Top left: VCOG president Craig Fifer (right) with the 2016 citizen open government award winner Professor Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech.
Top right: Norfolk City Councilwoman Andria McClellan speaks on a panel about government and social media, while Tidewater Community College's James Toscano (near left), Library of Virginia's Chad Owen and Josh Wheeler of the Thomas Jefferson Center look on.
Bottom left: The view of the festively decorated Grand Salon from the back of the room.
Bottom right: David Ogburn of Capital Results talks about business needs for confidentiality of proprietary information.
THANK YOU to all of our sponsors and the 80+ people who registered.
Mount Jackson Town Council will hold a special meeting at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday to reaffirm the appointments of Robert Whitehurst Jr. and Larry Ambrose to the Planning Commission. The council appointed Whitehurst and Ambrose to the commission in July. At that time, council rescheduled the July meeting from 9:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. but failed to notify the public and advertise in the media, as the Virginia Freedom of Information Act requires. While Mayor J.G. “Bucky” Miller maintains the meeting was rescheduled due a work conflict with his full-time job, he said he acknowledges the meeting was illegal and wants to patch things up, as he was advised by the town attorney. “The time change was a FOIA violation missed by staff and all others,” he said. “It was an accident, but we’re going back to set the record straight.”
Northern Virginia Daily
Just as the Times-Mirror is distributed to homes and sites throughout Loudoun County on Thursday, the newspaper’s editor will be speaking at James Madison’s home in Orange County on an enduring idea about newspapers and government. Executive Editor Dale Peskin joins a group of business leaders and attorneys at Montpelier for a discussion about the public’s right to know. The discussion is being conducted by the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. The topic at Montpelier is this: the confidentiality of business information. The discussion considers whether private enterprises conducting business with governments are entitled to withhold information from the public. We understand this topic well in Loudoun County, where developers regularly tease planners, the county’s economic marketers and our elected officials with elaborate schemes, dreams and high-priced projects. Developers influence decisions with advocates they pay to advise decision makers. They make strategic campaign contributions. County supervisors typically comply with requests to negotiate with them behind closed doors, outside the scrutiny of the public or the press.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
National Stories
Back in February, a nonprofit group called Reclaim the Records filed requests for Missouri birth and death listings from 1910 through 2015. The California-based outfit describes itself as a “group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates who are filing Freedom of Information requests to get public data released back into the public domain.” The group sought the information under Missouri’s Sunshine Law. After more than four months, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) finally got back to Reclaim the Records with an estimate of what its request would cost. A letter from the legal office of the department estimated the birth list would take the agency 23,376 hours to compile and the death list 11,688 hours. At $42.50 an hour, the tab came to an eye-popping $1.5 million.
KCUR
Critics and supporters of Donald Trump’s deal that kept Carrier Corp. from exporting hundreds of jobs from Indiana to Mexico have spent much of the past week arguing about how many jobs the deal actually saved. But what the public will likely never know is how much the deal helps the air conditioning company’s annual state tax bill. It's information that's typically not released but can reveal whether a tax incentive has the potential to bring a business' state tax burden down to zero.
Governing
Editorials/Columns
Back in the day, the Daily Press Editorial Board used to hand out a monthly Open Door Award to a public official or organization in recognition of dedication to transparency and public access. While it is no longer a regular feature on these pages, we see no reason why they couldn't be awarded intermittently as deserved, such as this week to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. VIMS is putting decades of studies and research regarding the Chesapeake Bay online through the state's Open Data Portal, an online clearinghouse established in 2014 by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to make large batches of open information on a wide variety of subjects available to citizens at one convenient location. You can access it at data.virginia.gov.
Daily Press
Was the Virginia Beach city attorney in error when he advised a supermajority vote [was needed to pass an amendment to the terms of a deal to build an arena in the city]? Did he misinterpret the commonwealth’s constitution? When I spoke with City Attorney Mark Stiles on Thursday, he would say only that he’s reviewing the legal opinion and hopes “to be able to meet with City Council in executive session next Tuesday” to offer advice on whether the law did indeed require a supermajority vote. Meanwhile, Beach taxpayers wait and watch as developers attempt to have their way – once again – with elected officials.
Kerry Dougherty, Virginian-Pilot
Top left: VCOG president Craig Fifer (right) with the 2016 citizen open government award winner Professor Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech.
Top right: Norfolk City Councilwoman Andria McClellan speaks on a panel about government and social media, while Tidewater Community College's James Toscano (near left), Library of Virginia's Chad Owen and Josh Wheeler of the Thomas Jefferson Center look on.
Bottom left: The view of the festively decorated Grand Salon from the back of the room.
Bottom right: David Ogburn of Capital Results talks about business needs for confidentiality of proprietary information.
THANK YOU to all of our sponsors and the 80+ people who registered.
Mount Jackson Town Council will hold a special meeting at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday to reaffirm the appointments of Robert Whitehurst Jr. and Larry Ambrose to the Planning Commission. The council appointed Whitehurst and Ambrose to the commission in July. At that time, council rescheduled the July meeting from 9:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. but failed to notify the public and advertise in the media, as the Virginia Freedom of Information Act requires. While Mayor J.G. “Bucky” Miller maintains the meeting was rescheduled due a work conflict with his full-time job, he said he acknowledges the meeting was illegal and wants to patch things up, as he was advised by the town attorney. “The time change was a FOIA violation missed by staff and all others,” he said. “It was an accident, but we’re going back to set the record straight.”
Northern Virginia Daily
Just as the Times-Mirror is distributed to homes and sites throughout Loudoun County on Thursday, the newspaper’s editor will be speaking at James Madison’s home in Orange County on an enduring idea about newspapers and government. Executive Editor Dale Peskin joins a group of business leaders and attorneys at Montpelier for a discussion about the public’s right to know. The discussion is being conducted by the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. The topic at Montpelier is this: the confidentiality of business information. The discussion considers whether private enterprises conducting business with governments are entitled to withhold information from the public. We understand this topic well in Loudoun County, where developers regularly tease planners, the county’s economic marketers and our elected officials with elaborate schemes, dreams and high-priced projects. Developers influence decisions with advocates they pay to advise decision makers. They make strategic campaign contributions. County supervisors typically comply with requests to negotiate with them behind closed doors, outside the scrutiny of the public or the press.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
National Stories
Back in February, a nonprofit group called Reclaim the Records filed requests for Missouri birth and death listings from 1910 through 2015. The California-based outfit describes itself as a “group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates who are filing Freedom of Information requests to get public data released back into the public domain.” The group sought the information under Missouri’s Sunshine Law. After more than four months, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) finally got back to Reclaim the Records with an estimate of what its request would cost. A letter from the legal office of the department estimated the birth list would take the agency 23,376 hours to compile and the death list 11,688 hours. At $42.50 an hour, the tab came to an eye-popping $1.5 million.
KCUR
Critics and supporters of Donald Trump’s deal that kept Carrier Corp. from exporting hundreds of jobs from Indiana to Mexico have spent much of the past week arguing about how many jobs the deal actually saved. But what the public will likely never know is how much the deal helps the air conditioning company’s annual state tax bill. It's information that's typically not released but can reveal whether a tax incentive has the potential to bring a business' state tax burden down to zero.
Governing
Editorials/Columns
Back in the day, the Daily Press Editorial Board used to hand out a monthly Open Door Award to a public official or organization in recognition of dedication to transparency and public access. While it is no longer a regular feature on these pages, we see no reason why they couldn't be awarded intermittently as deserved, such as this week to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. VIMS is putting decades of studies and research regarding the Chesapeake Bay online through the state's Open Data Portal, an online clearinghouse established in 2014 by Gov. Terry McAuliffe to make large batches of open information on a wide variety of subjects available to citizens at one convenient location. You can access it at data.virginia.gov.
Daily Press
Was the Virginia Beach city attorney in error when he advised a supermajority vote [was needed to pass an amendment to the terms of a deal to build an arena in the city]? Did he misinterpret the commonwealth’s constitution? When I spoke with City Attorney Mark Stiles on Thursday, he would say only that he’s reviewing the legal opinion and hopes “to be able to meet with City Council in executive session next Tuesday” to offer advice on whether the law did indeed require a supermajority vote. Meanwhile, Beach taxpayers wait and watch as developers attempt to have their way – once again – with elected officials.
Kerry Dougherty, Virginian-Pilot
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