Transparency News 8/1/17

Tuesday, August 1, 2017



State and Local Stories

Do you know a reporter who has used public records to shed light on an important community issue? How about someone in government who goes above and beyond the letter of the law to promote transparency? Or, maybe you know a citizen who has used his or her own time and money to get answers from our representative government?

Nominate your FOI hero on VCOG’s website. Awards will be announced in November and winners will be acknowledged at VCOG’s annual conference on Nov. 16 at the Richmond Times-Dispatch building.

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After a contentious hour and a half and numerous comments from city residents, Hopewell City Council voted Monday night to advertise for a new city manager. Council also voted 4-3 to not appoint Assistant City Manager Charles Dane to the position at the departure of current City Manager Mark Haley.  Dane will not be prohibited from applying for the position, however a letter from Dane to City Council indicates he would not seek the job if a broader search is launched. Dane’s letter, recently leaked to the public, notes the assistant city manager’s “concern” that no one from Council had approached him about filling the position of city manager after Haley’s departure in either an interim or a permanent capacity.
Progress-Index



National Stories
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The state's environmental regulatory agency violated Delaware's open records law in an ongoing saga over crude oil shipments made by the Delaware City Refinery. Attorney General Matt Denn's office ruled that DNREC violated the Freedom of Information Act by failing to properly respond to the Delaware Audubon Society's 2016 request for records pertaining to shipments that potentially violated state rules. Delaware's FOIA law gives state agencies 15 days to either provide access to the records sought, deny the request or advise that additional time is needed.  But it took the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control nearly a year to answer the Delaware Audubon Society. And even then, the state agency turned over only three of 1,300 documents.
The News Journal

Government has a data problem. Put simply, it collects so much of it that it struggles to analyze most of it. Adnan Mahmud, founder and CEO of LiveStories, a firm that creates digital tools for visualizing data, estimates that government workers spend about 80 percent of their time trying to find data and only about 20 percent of their time analyzing it. “We need to flip that number,” he says. He and others argue that government needs a better way to sift through and tell the story that lies behind the data it collects. But most important, it needs people who can analyze and diagnose what it means.
That’s where “citizen data scientists” come in. These people aren’t statisticians or analysts by training, nor are they coders -- the people who build apps using government data and programming software during hackathons. Rather, these are skilled workers who can generate predictive models or pursue data analysis using new software tools or apps. The technology research firm Gartner predicts that as much as 40 percent of data science tasks will be either automated or conducted by these nonexperts by 2020.
Governing


Editorials/Columns


The Freedom of Information Advisory Council has known only one executive director since its creation in July 2000: Maria Everett. And during that time, she has been a knowledgeable and respected voice on all issues informing FOIA and open government in Virginia. A recent column by Dan Casey of the Roanoke Times speaks to Everett’s central, and essential, role in providing a seasoned perspective on transparency debates in the commonwealth. He points out that as director of the FOIA council, she has been instrumental in providing training for thousands of Virginians, including those serving as FOIA officers. She told the Roanoke Times that FOIA Council Senior Attorney Alan Gernhardt, her assistant, will replace her as director. That should provide the public confidence that there will be an experienced hand on the tiller following her departure. But the commonwealth cannot afford to see another key open government institution backslide, so Gernhardt has a challenging task before him. He will need to resist efforts, by lawmakers and the courts, to chip away at access. He must ensure that the voices advocating for transparency are heard.
Virginian-Pilot

On Friday we took Dominion CEO Thomas Farrell to the woodshed. Farrell chairs a search committee helping Richmond find a new school superintendent, and he asked members of the committee not to blab any details — even to members of the School Board itself. He also had them sign a confidentiality agreement that mentioned the possibility of legal action. Since then we have heard from Dawn Page, chairman of the School Board. She says she was aware of the confidentiality requirement, and was on board with it. The School Board’s consent doesn’t make the pledge of secrecy a brilliant idea. There’s a difference between discretion and a cone of silence.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Congress should consider whether to mandate the release of the visitor logs at the primary and secondary residences, and even vacation homes, of all presidents. Certain types of information of course would still be protected by executive privilege under some circumstances. Any such measure by Congress should tilt in favor of disclosure and include a review mechanism that is independent of the president and other executive branch officials.
Mitchell A. Sollenberger and Mark J. Rozell, USA Today