Transparency News 9/22/17

Friday, September 22, 2017



State and Local Stories

Social media provide powerful and vital tools to disseminate information to the public. But if used poorly, either deliberately or by accident, the results can be embarrassing or catastrophic. “We protect what we must and share what we can,” said Carolyn Reams, content manager, Web strategist and social-media lead for the Central Intelligence Agency. Reams was among panelists from intelligence, space, military and law-enforcement agencies who spoke Sept. 14 at Social Media Week independent (SMWi), an event was sponsored by the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority and held at Capital One’s headquarters in Tysons. Christopher Dorobek of GovLoop’s DorobekInsider moderated the panel discussion, titled “The New Rules of Citizen Engagement.” Panelists concurred social media was important, but some agencies had an easier time than others in sharing their operations with the public.
InsideNoVa

Virginia is asking for emergency court relief to prevent Northrop Grumman Corp. from shutting down email service for more than 56,000 state employees less than two weeks before the election of a new governor. The Virginia Information Technologies Agency, known as VITA, filed a motion in Richmond Circuit Court on Sept. 14 to seek an injunction to stop the corporate contractor from ending messaging service Oct. 27. “Stating the obvious, if Northrop Grumman were allowed to shut down the commonwealth’s email system, the results would be catastrophic for commonwealth agencies, whose important work protects the welfare and safety of the commonwealth and its citizens,” VITA states in the motion. A hearing is scheduled Wednesday in Richmond Circuit Court to hear the state’s motion.
Richmond Times-Dispatch



National Stories
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A legal battle over records tied to former Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge has ended with the city reaching an agreement on retaining city documents. The Los Angeles City Council voted 12 to 0 on Wednesday to approve the settlement with the First Amendment Coalition, a group that advocates for open government. The organization sued the city last year after it requested a range of emails and letters involving LaBonge and came up empty-handed. The lawsuit accused L.A. of flouting the California Public Records Act and improperly destroying records. California generally allows city governments to destroy some records if lawmakers and the city attorney approve, but not if the documents are unduplicated and less than 2 years old. Under the agreement announced Wednesday, the city will pay the group $20,000 to cover its legal fees, agreed that California Government Code section 34090 does not allow the destruction of records less than 2 years old, and must notify the organization during the next five years if it stops requiring records to be retained for at least two years.
Los Angeles Times



Editorials/Columns


The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed that public boards, councils and commissions violate the law when they split into small groups for closed huddles to keep their thoughts and plans under wraps. The case was Mayor and City Council of Columbus vs. The Commercial Dispatch. It started almost four years when a Dispatch reporter, Nate Gregory, learned that the town’s mayor organized a series of duplicate morning and afternoon sessions with council members to go over economic development and other topics. Three of the six council members were invited to the morning sessions and three to the afternoon sessions. Gregory asked to sit in and permission was denied. It became apparent the purpose of dual sessions was to avoid having a quorum in the room, thus defeating the tacit definition of “meeting” in the Mississippi Open Meetings Act.
Sun Herald

Let’s talk about time, if only for a moment so as not to waste too much of yours. More precious than gold, more fleeting than beauty, nobody who’s living a life worth living has an excess of time. Whether it is God, family, work or community, we’re allocating our time to things that further the American way. So I don’t flinch when I read stories about low attendance – or no attendance – at community board meetings, legislative hearings or any other kind of governmental activities that legacy media outlets rag on the public for not showing up to watch it. Suffice to say, we don’t have much additional time in our lives to monitor the daily business of elected and appointed officials – even on those rare occasions when public meetings become a theater of the absurd. And then there’s the business that is conducted next to the mushrooms that grow in the basements of our governmental haunts, deep in the darkness and away from the light of day. While we are throwing fits over the known public issues, the real terrors lie somewhere in a filing cabinet and on a spreadsheet.  Those dark dealings are unknown to the public without the protection of state sunshine laws.
Chris Krug, Watchdog.org