Transparency News, 10/12/2022

Wednesday
October 12, 2022

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state & local news stories

A banner 2022 for FanDuel can include Virginia, where it is the only mobile sports wagering operator to generate more than $1 billion handle and claim more than $100 million in gross revenue through the first seven months of the year. The Virginia Lottery fulfilled a Freedom of Information Act request from Sports Handle that included monthly revenue reports spanning January through July. The state recently changed its rules regarding deductions for promotional revenue, which has already proven to have a notable impact on monthly adjusted revenue totals subject to a 15% tax rate. The Virginia Lottery does not provide handle and revenue information by operator or by sport category in its monthly public report, with the most important second-level information provided being the number of operators that finished with a positive AGR eligible for taxation.
Sports Handle

Richmond police Chief Gerald Smith publicly praised the work of officers who investigated a tip that led to the seizure of weapons and ammunition from a South Side home on July 1. “Our officers did great work,” Smith said in mid-August, about six weeks after he publicly said the investigation stopped a mass shooting from happening at an Independence Day celebration at Byrd Park’s Dogwood Dell. Detective Michael Kiniry was the lead detective on the case, and no one has questioned the work done by investigators. Kiniry was later approved to join the FBI’s Richmond Area Violent Enterprise Task Force, known by the acronym RAVE, a prestigious role. According to an Aug. 19 letter the newspaper obtained through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, a police supervisor signed the letter to Stanley Meador, the special agent in charge of the Richmond FBI office. Behind the scenes, though, Smith on Sept. 2 blocked Kiniry from joining the task force, according to two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about potential retaliation. It happened while the chief continued to face scrutiny for claiming that police had foiled a planned mass shooting without any corroborating evidence that they had.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Spotsylvania School Board members are now defendants in two lawsuits moving through the county judicial system. Last week, two county residents, Jeffrey Glazer and Christina Ramos, filed a petition in the Circuit Court requesting “a temporary and permanent injunction against the hiring of Mark Taylor,” and on Tuesday morning, Circuit Court Judge Ricardo Rigual heard arguments appealing the dismissal earlier this year of a petition alleging the School Board violated the Freedom of Information Act at its first meeting in January. The petition filed Oct. 4 by Glazer and Ramos, who are the parents or legal guardians of students who attend Spotsylvania County Public Schools, cites Virginia Code section 22.1-87, which permits any parent, custodian or legal guardian to request judicial review of action by a School Board. Glazer and Ramos are requesting judicial review of the School Board’s decisions on Sept. 15 and 16 to offer to and negotiate a contract with Taylor, an attorney and former administrator with several Virginia counties who has no background in education, for the position of superintendent. It also argues that School Board Chair Kirk Twigg acted improperly in informing the Virginia Department of Education staff that Taylor was the “final candidate” before the board voted to recommend him and by signing a final contract with Taylor without board approval. Also on Tuesday morning, Jeremy Capps, an attorney representing the School Board, and Fred and Jenna Edwards, attorneys representing former Spotsylvania student Makaila Keyes, were in Circuit Court to present arguments related to a petition Keyes filed in March alleging the violation of her rights under FOIA.
The Free Lance-Star

The Richmond Times-Dispatch shed nearly 50,000 subscribers over the last 10 years. Driving the news: The disclosure comes via an annual notice the U.S. Postal Service requires periodicals to publish every October in order to qualify for discount postage. What’s happening: The RTD’s latest report shows the number of print subscribers has dwindled to just over 37,000. Meanwhile, the number of paid digital subscriptions has risen to more than 22,000 — accounting for over a third of the paper’s total subscribers. Why it matters: Even in its diminished state, the paper continues to play an important watchdog role in the region.
Axios Richmond

October 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the Office of the State Inspector General’s State Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Hotline. As part of government reform initiatives in 1992, Governor Douglas Wilder created the Hotline under the Department of the State Internal Auditor to help executive branch agencies improve efficiency and effectiveness by answering and investigating allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse reported by state employees. To date, the hotline has received more than 22,000 calls from concerned citizens and state workers, with nearly 14,000 cases identified in the last 30 years. Most of the allegations were deemed unsubstantiated, with 29% substantiated.
WSET

Nottoway County residents deserve better than the public bickering and arguing they have witnessed and read about over the past two years, and they’re tired of the in-fighting, particularly at Electoral Board meetings. That was the message last week from two Burkeville men — Spike Zumbro and James Beverly — neither of whom have attended or spoken at any recent Electoral Board meetings. Zumbro, who chuckled that he wasn’t a star student while being educated in Nottoway and later Lunenburg Public Schools, began his remarks by paraphrasing a quote from Greek philosopher Plato: “‘One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by inferiors.’ Now I’m not calling anybody an inferior, but we’ve come to a point in Nottoway where everything is so off-kilter.”
Courier-Record

stories of national interest

Secret Service agents asked the agency for a record of all of the communications seized from their personal cellphones as part of investigations into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but were rebuffed, according to a document reviewed by NBC News. The Secret Service’s office that handles such requests, the Freedom of Information Act Program, denied the request, in which agents invoked the Privacy Act to demand more information about what had been shared from their personal devices. The request was made in early August, just after news came to light that both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general were interested in obtaining text messages of Secret Service agents that had been erased as part of what the agency said was a planned upgrade.
NBC News

Body-camera footage from multiple Riverdale Park police officers was released Tuesday by the Maryland Office of the Attorney General, showing the moments before 75-year-old Bryan Coupal, a reportedly suicidal man, was fatally shot by an officer. The attorney general’s Independent Investigations Division, which was created last year as part of a statewide push for police reform, published the footage on YouTube as part of its transparency protocol and ongoing review of the Sept. 19 shooting. The division investigates all incidents in which someone is killed during an interaction with police.
The Washington Post
 

editorials & columns

It’s a fact of life for public bureaucrats that they almost never get noticed for the things they do, even when their work is spectacularly good or egregiously bad. There are exceptions: J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Moses are famous, more for their excesses than for their achievements. But the overwhelming majority of those who toil in our public bureaucracies, even those in relatively high positions, do it far from the glare of the media or the public at large. In common with this rule, it is no surprise that William H. Leighty, a civil servant who spent nearly three decades in the bureaucratic folds of Virginia government, is almost totally unknown outside his state and not very well known to most people within it. After a decade in academia following his retirement from the state government system, Leighty has chosen to tell us. In a forthcoming book that he is tentatively calling Capitol Secrets, Leighty documents the strategies and maneuvers he practiced successfully from the late 1970s, when he started out as a legislative aide in the Virginia Senate, to the end of 2007, when he retired as chief of staff to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. At the end of his book, Leighty offers a few pieces of advice that may not seem new to many readers. He advises aspiring public servants to tell the truth, share credit, pursue continuous improvement and pay close attention to agency finances.
Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing

One thing that Jason Leopold clearly learned is that when the government stalls and denies, it often makes the most sense to just sue. Under the federal FOIA, agencies have a very short term before they need to respond, and they almost never actually comply with that (often taking years, rather than weeks). At some point, you just need to sue to force the matter. So, that’s what happened in this case, where he sued the DOJ back in April 2021 due to their FOIA shenanigans. I won’t go into all of the details, but Leopold was seeking information on the January 6th insurrection, and what was happening inside the DOJ following that date. He filed a FOIA with the Executive Office of Immigration Review. There were some disagreements over which agencies/departments he should be filing the FOIA requests over, but eventually the government handed over some documents he had requested (again, which belong to the public). Leopold’s lawyer asked for fees over having to have filed the lawsuit, and it appears that the EOIR and the DOJ are being incredibly and ridiculously petty about it, and filed an opposition to the fee request by just attacking Leopold personally. The filing opens by saying that they didn’t even have anything interesting to hand over to him in response to the FOIA. Basically, they seem very put out that they had to obey our FOIA law and give Leopold what he asked for. That it wasn’t something juicy does not matter. I don’t see anywhere in FOIA where it says that the government only has to hand over stuff that makes for juicy scoops. The way that journalists like Leopold find the important stories is by requesting lots of documents and figuring out what’s actually newsworthy. The DOJ shouldn’t be getting snarky about the contents of the document they were required to hand over by law. But the filing gets worse: "Despite accomplishing almost nothing by filing this suit against EOIR, Plaintiffs seek to have the taxpayer finance it." That framing is so obnoxious. The taxpayers pay you to do your job, DOJ and EOIR. And you didn’t. And that’s why Leopold had to file the FOIA request in the first place. Don’t try to pretend that this is some sort of scam on the taxpayer.
Mike Masnick, Techdirt