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"The rate of unrecorded votes in the House dropped from 88% in 2017 to 33% this year."
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ICYMI, Transparency Virginia released its fourth report on sunshine in the General Assembly. This year's report notes the many areas of improvement in transparency, most notably the adoption of House Rule 18c that requires a recorded vote to defeat proposed legislation in committee or subcommittee. As a result, the rate of unrecorded votes in the House dropped from 88 percent in 2017 to 33 percent this year.
Read the report here
The president of George Mason University has ordered an inquiry into whether big-money donors are being given undue influence over academic matters, after documents were released showing that the Charles Koch Foundation had been given a voice in hiring and firing professors. The university president, Angel Cabrera, wrote in an email to faculty Monday night that he was ordering the investigation after learning of documents revealing “problematic gift agreements.” The newly released documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Samantha Parsons of UnKoch My Campus, a group that seeks to expose the influence of the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch over colleges and universities. “The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that Koch really demonstrated the way in which any big donor could have influence over academia if the university is willing to agree to those terms,” Ms. Parsons, a former George Mason student, said. Ms. Parsons said she believed that there were other Koch Foundation agreements that had not been released. “If they’re saying the problem is null and void, they need to release all the agreements that haven’t expired,” Ms. Parsons said.
The New York Times
Virginia has reached two milestones in its long, litigious effort to disentangle the state’s vast information technology network from a multibillion-dollar contract with Northrop Grumman. The state awarded a $120 million, five-year contract this week to the North American subsidiary of Atos, a French-based global technology company, to provide advanced managed security services to state executive branch agencies. The deal also provides for extending the five-year term. The agreement, announced Monday, is the fourth contract the state has awarded for services that had been provided solely by Northrop Grumman under a $2.4 billion, 13-year contract that will expire in mid-2019. On the same day, Virginia completed the transition of more than 55,000 state employees to a new, Google-based messaging system, after a costly, protracted stalemate between the state’s IT agency and Northrop Grumman over the terms of their increasingly bitter divorce.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
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