Transparency News, 11/9/21

More than a quarter of Virginia’s spending aimed at enticing businesses to the state over the past decade has gone toward sales and use tax exemptions for data centers, a report from Virginia’s legislative watchdog found.  Of nearly $3 billion in economic development incentives between fiscal years 2011 and 2020, roughly $837 million, or 28 percent of Virginia’s overall foregone revenues, was tied to the state’s data center exemption, according to the report from the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission presented to legislators Monday.  JLARC also concluded that increases in state spending on business incentives beginning in fiscal year 2016 were driven by the exemptions. 
Virginia Mercury

City employees are allowed to run for the City Council or mayor in Virginia Beach, but a council member would like to see that law change. Aaron Rouse is sponsoring an item on the city’s proposed 2022 legislative agenda for the General Assembly in Richmond. Council member Rocky Holcomb, a chief deputy in the Sheriff’s Office, said he’s not happy about the idea of restricting candidates. The request to amend the state law would prohibit city employees as well as employees of constitutional officers and the School Board from running for office. Rouse said he’s sponsoring it because of concerns he has heard from the community about potential conflict of interests and that it wasn’t anything personal against Holcomb, who sits next to him on dais and works for a constitutional officer. Other items in the city’s legislative agenda include: Revise the Freedom of Information Act to allow localities to withhold identifying information for complainants of nuisance-related, city code violations.
The Virginian-Pilot

A lawsuit in Washington, D.C., federal court seeks greater public access to non-prosecution agreements between the U.S. Justice Department and corporations that have faced misconduct allegations. The public records complaint filed on Friday asks a court to force the Justice Department to release 12 case files from 2015 and 2019 in which the government signed non-prosecution agreements with an array of corporate defendants. The complaint also demanded a list of all corporate non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements since 2009. . . . Plaintiff Jonathan Ashley, a business reference librarian at University of Virginia School of Law, created the Corporate Prosecution Registry website in 2017 with law professor Brandon Garrett, now at Duke University School of Law.
Reuters

 

If you blinked you missed it. Former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request to a federal judge late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. And just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it, contending the request itself was legally defective and “premature.” The unusual exchange, which happened in a span of two hours, comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to prevent Congress from peering into his White House’s records about his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Trump sued to block the National Archives from turning the records over last month, after President Joe Biden declined to assert executive privilege on his behalf. The Archives indicated it would turn the papers over to lawmakers by Friday, unless a court intervened.
Politico

Vanessa Bryant’s lawyers filed a motion Monday in her lawsuit over the helicopter crash scene photos taken by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies that, if granted, would require jurors to assume the wider public sharing of the images because evidence was destroyed. The motion for spoliation sanctions is the latest move in the lawsuit by the widow of Kobe Bryant for severe emotional distress after learning that deputies and firefighters shared gruesome images of the crash scene where her husband, daughter Gianna and seven others died in January 2020. The photos were shared internally and by one deputy who displayed his cellphone in a Norwalk bar and a fire captain who showed the images on his phone at an award show cocktail hour.
Los Angeles Times

 

 

Buried deep within the recently passed infrastructure bill’s 2,740 pages are several provisions that have received little public attention but could dramatically affect the public’s access to information created under its programs. From cybersecurity to transportation research to Native American historical resources, H.R. 3684 is unusually full of efforts to create new exemptions to the federal Freedom of Information Act, and Congress hasn’t said why. Although FOIA has just nine exemptions, the third (commonly referred to as “b3”) exempts records that are required to be withheld under other statutes. Courts have offered guidance on dozens of statutes over the years, but no comprehensive list of b3 statutes exists. In 2010, ProPublica reported that agencies cited more than 240 laws over a two-year period to deny information in response to FOIA requests. And a 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that agencies cited 256 statutes to deny FOIA requests between fiscal years 2010 and 2019. But until a statute is cited by an agency to withhold records, and is tested in the courts, its status as a viable b3 exemption remains uncertain. Because FOIA litigation is relatively rare, a statute can effectively operate as a categorical exemption without judicial review even if it does not meet b3’s requirements. The infrastructure bill, as recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, contains an abnormally high number of references to FOIA, many of which appear to be aimed at shielding records from the public.
Adam Marshall, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press