Transparency News, 10/18/2022
Tuesday
October 18, 2022
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state & local news stories
Former Portsmouth City Manager Angel Jones levied explosive corruption allegations against the four City Council members who fired her in a lawsuit against the city Monday, claiming several of them received bribes in connection with job openings or city projects that would require a council vote. Jones, who was fired abruptly with a 4-3 vote of the City Council in May, alleges in her lawsuit that Vice Mayor De’Andre Barnes and councilmen Paul Battle and Christopher Woodard Jr. received bribes from former councilman Danny Meeks to support hiring him for the then-vacant city manager position. Jones also alleges that Barnes accepted a $14,000 bribe — and an offer to pay off an estimated $25,000 in delinquent child support payments — from a Portsmouth resident, Eugene Swinson, for Barnes’ support in getting Swinson’s sister, Sunshine Swinson, hired as city manager. She is asking for $5 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. She also offered a second option in the lawsuit: The city could pay her two years’ worth of her salary and benefits and the city officials she’s alleging committed illegal acts could resign immediately and never seek public office again.
The Virginian-Pilot
The Charlottesville City Council on Monday issued new personnel policies, months after local activists called on the city to fire information technology employee Allen Groat for attending the Jan. 6 insurrection. Mayor Lloyd Snook sent The Daily Progress the new regulations, which went into effect Monday. In August, Snook said the City Council would likely get a new draft of personnel policies in October. Snook emailed the new regulations Monday afternoon, after the city released the former regulations in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Daily Progress. The new policies require employees to be honest, regulate their social media use and offers guidance for off-duty behavior. They do not apply retroactively.
The Daily Progress
Some of it is easy to see, with the constant construction of luxury offices and apartments and the hard-won redevelopment of public and low-income housing communities. Older homes are being renovated anew and new neighbors are arriving every day. But many of the changes aren’t as visible as orange detour signs, backhoes or moving trucks. Over the past decade, the percentage of Black residents has shrunk, even as Charlottesville’s population overall has become slightly more racially and ethnically diverse. Overall, city residents are older and richer than they were. And the city is an increasingly expensive place to live. As new data shows, the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting pushed out. Using data sets from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Project and the Charlottesville Open Data Portal, we’ve put numbers to some of these harder-to-see — or entirely invisible — shifts.
Charlottesville Tomorrow
stories of national interest
Facebook parent company Meta may face a $24.6 million penalty in Washington state for intentionally violating the state’s campaign finance transparency laws 822 times. The motion for the maximum penalty was filed by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson according to a Friday morning news release. Meta claimed in September that the transparency laws were “too burdensome.”Judge North disagreed, and told the company that, “The only…information that has to be made available is the information that Meta is already collecting. They necessarily collect it in order to be able to run the ads that they’re running. So all they have to do in order to display it is essentially press a button.”
Tri-City Herald
In addition to prompting widespread outrage, the revelation that members of the Los Angeles City Council exchanged racist jibes at a secret meeting with a top labor leader has led some Californians to wonder whether they crossed a legal line as well.
Los Angeles Times
