Transparency News 10/3/16

 

A community activist is calling on Charlottesville’s City Council to backtrack on a series of new policies altering the way council meetings are conducted, specifically with regard to council discussions and the customary public comment period at the start of each meeting. Last month, following a six-month trial period for the new public comment procedures that require speakers to sign up ahead of meetings, the council attempted to allay concerns by amending the sign-up procedures to reserve three slots for attendees who had not signed up in advance. But some are not satisfied with the changes. As some believe they are not being heard by the council, JoAnn Robertson, the author of a petition that went online Tuesday, said those citizens will make a decision: either “throw in the towel” or “become more drastic about free speech.” A few people have certainly been impassioned by the change, but according to open data advocacy nonprofit Smart Cville, the council may be on track to have slightly more people speaking at meetings this year than in recent years.
Daily Progress

The Shenandoah County Sheriff’s Office is charging into the social media age with a more active Facebook page and a new commitment to Twitter. Sheriff Timothy C. Carter said the goal is to forge deeper connections with the public at a time when more people are relying on new forms of communication for information on all kinds of subjects, including law enforcement.
Northern Virginia Daily

Loudoun County Chairwoman Phyllis Randall (D-At Large) says she turned down an invitation to fly with the Washington Redskins and accompany the team to events during their voyage to London for a week eight match-up with the Cincinnati Bengals. “It's a very, very kind offer, and I really appreciate it. They are a great business here in Loudoun,” Randall told the Times-Mirror in a Sept. 26 interview. But, she added, “I don't know how me attending the game with them helps the citizens of Loudoun.” The first-term chairwoman said even though taxpayers wouldn't be footing any of the bill for the trip, she didn't like the way it could look.
Loudoun Times-Mirror

Del. James Edmunds has a word of warning for those who get their news from social media: “You have to understand, half of the stuff on there is not true. I look at it as entertainment value.” Edmunds, who regularly interacts with constituents on his public Facebook page, crossed lines of fact and fiction this week when he shared a link from a fake news website — “the Baltimore Gazette” — that purports to blow open a conspiracy between Hillary Clinton and NBC News leading up to this week’s presidential debate. A number of commenters who took part in the discussion thread took issue with what they suggested was the delegate’s cavalier attitude towards the truth. Yet others defended the post as a good-for-the-gander rejoinder to Clinton. By Thursday, most of the comments had disappeared from Edmunds’ page. Asked about the missing remarks by his Facebook fans, Edmunds said he did not delete any information from his page and only learned about the heated back-and-forth when his wife pointed it out to him. “I haven’t touched [the thread] or manipulated it, any comments whatsoever,” he said. A screen capture image of now-missing comments was provided for use in this article.
South Boston News & Record


National Stories
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The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once called the Freedom of Information Act “the Taj Mahal of the doctrine of unanticipated consequences, the Sistine Chapel of cost-benefit analysis ignored.” For investigative reporters — and increasingly, community groups and even just interested individuals — FOIA is often the single-most useful tool at their disposal. But even in 2016, as the FOIA law turns 50 years old and as government communications move onto digital platforms, reporters continue to be frustrated by delays and stonewalling, and officials continue to feel overwhelmed by the volume of requests coming their way. Both sides of the exchange are affected by underdeveloped technical infrastructure for finding, sorting, and delivering records.
Nieman Lab

A state commission has ordered two former school board members who admitted leaking sensitive contract information to outsiders to turn over their email records about the breach. The order, reached earlier this week by the state Freedom of Information Commission, is despite testimony by Kathryn Hamilton and David Freedman that the records don’t exist, because they configured their email systems to delete messages as soon as they are sent. The hearing officer wrote in his decision that he had a hard time believing it, calling their testimony “evasive,” “non-responsive” and “inconsistent.” But even if they did delete the emails, Perpetua ruled, they must comply with the order.
Danbury News Times

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided that Act 13, the state Legislature's 2012 attempt to accommodate the shale gas industry is an unconstitutional "special law" that benefits specific groups or industries. The court, in a decision Wednesday, said Act 13's provisions limiting notification of spills and leaks to public water suppliers but not to private well owners, and its so-called "physician gag order" restricting health care professionals from getting information about drilling chemicals that could harm their patients, violate the state Constitution's prohibition against such special laws.
Governing

The Lego model of a new municipal building sits on a table outside what used to be the office of Mayor Eugene W. Grant, the top elected official in Seat Pleasant, Md., population 4,600. It is a symbol of everything that Grant, 49, fervently believes his struggling city could be. Could be, that is, if Grant’s dreams weren’t constantly thwarted by what he sees as a recalcitrant city council, which torpedoed his first attempt to build a grander version of City Hall, and then booted him out of the building altogether two years ago to punish him for yelling at staffers. Grant, who leads a local nonprofit group, did not go quietly, setting up a tent so he could meet with constituents and, eventually, commandeering his former office — now a conference room — once his nemesis city manager was fired and police got tired of kicking him out. This year, he recruited a slate of council candidates to run against the incumbents he had decided would not support him. Elections were held last month, drawing just 359 voters. All but one member of Grant’s challenger slate won, with margins of 28 votes or fewer.
Washington Post


Editorials/Columns

The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has focused a floodlight on the threat that secrecy poses to public health and safety and the critical need for greater transparency to combat it. Flint is only the latest illustration of officials hiding information about toxins in the water. In Washington, D.C., federal officials shielded information from the public and minimized concerns over dangerous levels of lead toxins in the municipal water. And Flint and D.C. are far from being alone; a recent USA Today analysis of EPA data has shown that hundreds of schools across the country suffer from lead-tainted water. The investigation also highlights the lack of enforcement from the EPA and some state governments, and, in many cases, a failure to fix problems immediately. Critically, as in both Flint and D.C., those who suffer the worst, if not all, the impacts of such concealment and malfeasance are too often communities of color. Publicly accessible and usable information is central to combating these structural injustices and disproportionate consequences, and forcing the larger community to pay attention.
Patrice McDermott and Jesse Franzblau, Roanoke Times

It didn’t take long for community concerns about police cars with their hoods up on hot and humid days to be addressed. After just a few days of negative publicity on social media, the Danville Police Department banned the practice. The “problem” was solved — but nothing was accomplished. Has anyone been convicted of a crime in Danville while crying out about the injustice of a police car’s hood blocking the recording of video evidence that could have set them free? We know of no criminal cases where “hood raising” blocked the recording of anything that could have affected a criminal or civil trial.
Register & Bee

At a retreat to plan how Loudoun navigates the present and moves toward its future, the chair of the Board of Supervisors proposed to add a word to the board’s vision statement. “I’d like to add the word ‘learn,'” Phyllis Randall (D-At Large) said. “ ... live, work, learn and play.” Debate emerged over whether “learn” should be part of the Loudoun vision. “If we’re going do that, I’d like to say to run a business,” Supervisor Suzanne Volpe (R-Algonkian) countered. While Volpe may disagree with Randall about a vision, there’s not much to dislike about Randall’s choice of a word. In the context Randall intended, “learn” relates to the county becoming a “learning organization,” the business term given to an organization that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. Learning will inform how the county lives, works and play. As nine supervisors lead Loudoun into the future, we wonder why some are so reluctant to embrace it.
Loudoun Times-Mirror