Transparency News 11/6/17

Monday, November 6, 2017



State and Local Stories

VCOG’s annual conference: tentative line-up of panels:

• From watchdog to the watched -- It's not unusual for journalists to go into government service, usually in communication departments or public information. But have you ever heard them explain what  was like to see the world through a different set of lenses?
• The Old Dominion and the Old North State -- Virginia's longest border-neighbor, North Carolina, faces many of the same access issues Virginia does, but what do we do differently?
• The Rolling Stone case -- The defamation trial a UVA official against the well-known rock-n-roll magazine is broken down for us by a reporter who covered the trial and a 1st Amendment scholar who was also present.
• When the lawyers come in -- Citizens and media alike attempt to resolve FOIA disputes with government through discussion, negotiation and persuasion. But when that fails to break the impasse, it might be time to call in the attorneys. A veteran media law attorney tells us more.
• Pressures on front-line FOIA workers -- FOIA officers and other employees who handle FOIA requests on a daily basis often find themselves making decisions as much based on what pressures their bosses may be exerting on them as what the law says. A researcher tells us more.
• The silly season -- It's election time, and what better way to relive this year's roller coaster ride of an election cycle than with political humorist Beau Cribbs?

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An incident action plan for the Unite the Right rally shows Charlottesville police officers were told to notify their supervisors before making arrests. According to a heavily redacted document, officers were given special instructions to “make arrests as necessary after notification to supervisor, unless personal safety is compromised, in which supervisor notification should be done immediately after arrest.” Joseph Giacalone, a retired New York Police Department sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College in the city, said the phrasing in the action plan is not uncommon and is not a stand-down order. “That’s not the smoking gun that you’re looking for,” he said. “If there was a stand-down order, they wouldn’t put it on paper — let’s put it that way — because they know in the age of [Freedom of Information Act] requests and stuff like that … it would be a verbal thing,” Giacalone said. “It wouldn’t come down on a tactical plan for sure.”
Daily Progress


National Stories

Two weeks after the deadline passed, officials are still not releasing the St. Louis region’s proposal to attract Amazon’s second headquarters. The bid could contain information ranging from site locations and building mockups to the size of tax breaks offered by Missouri and Illinois and plans for the development of Mississippi riverfront. “Unfortunately, because of our (nondisclosure agreement) with Amazon, we cannot share the proposal,” Sheila Sweeney, the CEO of the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership, which coordinated and submitted the proposal, told the St. Louis Business Journal.
Belleville News-Democrat

When cities contract with the private sector for goods and services, they tend to go with the lowest bidder—at least, that’s what they’ve done historically. But performance-based contracts, in which governments also look at how well a contractor delivers on their promises, can help ensure higher-quality contracts and a better value in the long run. Performance-based contracting has been widely accepted as a best practice for years, and it’s become standard practice in the nation’s biggest cities. New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, for example, all consider performance when awarding contracts. (At times, big cities have even been criticized for not adopting a performance-based approach quickly enough: A 2014 audit in San Francisco, for instance, dinged the city for continuing to award contracts to poor performers.) Now the practice is spreading from big cities to mid-sized and small municipalities. But implementing such a shift isn’t easy.
Governing
http://www.governing.com/cityaccelerator/blog/lc-smaller-cities-performance-contracting.html


Editorials/Columns

Those of us who routinely ask government for records are used to suffering. We wait, and wait, and wait, sometimes for months, or years, for a magic e-mail or a letter in the mailbox. So I confess to schadenfreude to see my friends in government feeling the same pain. In this case, it’s Mille Lacs County (Minnesota) that has discovered the Freedom of Information Act’s exasperating reality. The county is embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe over law enforcement on the Mille Lacs Indian Reservation. In 2016, the county ended a 25-year agreement that allowed tribal police to work as fully authorized peace officers. That’s why the county filed a FOIA request in November 2016 to the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior. The county wanted all agreements, correspondence, notes and other records related to the tribe’s law enforcement powers. The Interior Department responded the next day with a letter identifying the staff member who would handle the request. It took nearly six months for the Department of Justice to respond, and when it did, it said it had “received an exceedingly heavy volume of Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act requests” and therefore could not comply with the law’s time limits, county records show. Oman noted that he’s not allowed to make that excuse if someone asks him for county records. Eleven months later, Oman and the county were still waiting.
Minneapolis Star Tribune