Transparency News 10/8/14
State and Local Stories
The Richmond city attorney said Monday that the City Council has made “missteps” recently in its procedure for closed meetings. City Attorney Allen L. Jackson didn’t go into much detail about the apparent errors during a brief discussion at Monday’s meeting of the council’s Organizational Development Committee, but he recommended tightening the process to ensure future closed-door meetings follow the correct protocol. The errors appear to be technical. Jackson recommended having the city clerk present at the beginning and end of the meeting to ensure the proper votes are happening and being recorded in the meeting minutes.
Times-Dispatch
Eight Richmond School Board members on Tuesday night released a joint statement accusing the ninth member, Tichi Pinkney Eppes, of breaching confidential student information. The statement expressed concern about the alleged breach but it did not elaborate, and officials declined to discuss the allegation in detail. “At the current time, we estimate that approximately 20 student records were compromised,” the statement says in part.
Times-Dispatch
Roanoke County Supervisor Al Bedrosian said Tuesday he did not think two Roanoke County department heads were disciplined harshly enough for substantiated claims of sexual harassment, misusing county credit cards and using office time for personal matters. Bedrosian and Catawba District Supervisor Butch Church have been a vocal minority on the board, publicly speaking out on this personnel matter since last month. Church attended the news conference, but sat in the shadows and said nothing. The matter first came to the public’s attention when Bedrosian and Church made a point to sit out of a closed-door session regarding the search for a new county administrator last month. They said they would not enter the meeting because the secret personnel issue that happened during the time of the previous county administrator needed to be dealt with before the open position was filled. Supervisors and county officials have not elaborated on the topic, claiming it is a “personnel matter.” “This was no routine personnel matter,” he said. “These violations were not only serious, but would ruin the trust between high-level managers and their employees.”
Roanoke Times
In a decision with potential implications for Virginia's congressional delegation, three federal judges ruled Tuesday that the lines of the state's 3rd Congressional District were drawn in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The panel of judges allowed next month's election to proceed under the existing district lines, but ordered the General Assembly to redraw them by April 1, in time for the next congressional election in 2016. The 3rd District is the only one of Virginia's 11 congressional districts with an African American majority. It has been represented since 1992 by Rep. Bobby Scott, a Newport News Democrat who is unopposed in the Nov. 4 election. In a 2-1 decision, the judges agreed with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed a year ago that the congressional redistricting plan adopted by the Republican-controlled Assembly in 2012 amounted to racial gerrymandering, packing African American voters into Scott's district and leaving adjoining districts safer for their Republican incumbents.
Virginian-Pilot
Two community meetings to gather feedback about budget priorities for Lynchburg City Schools are set to take place in the next few days. Anthony Beckles, the division’s chief financial officer, said he and Superintendent Scott Brabrand will lead the session. Opening presenta-tions will be short, he said, with the gathering focusing instead on input from community members. “We want to hear from them,” Beckles said.
News & Advance
Virginia Speaker of the House William Howell got a letter back from the U.S. Attorney's Office, answering without answering his request for guidance on appointments. Or, as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik put it, to Howell's letter "seeking a legal opinion from the Department of Justice (The Department) that you believe may be relevant to consideration by the Commonwealth of Virginia House of Delegates of certain appointments made by the Governor of Virginia." Kadzik responded that the Department of Justice (The Department) only provides legal advice to the executive branch of the federal government. Also, it can't confirm or deny the existence of any Puckett-related investigation.
Daily Press
Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s announcement of the Governor’s Commission on Integrity and Public Confidence in State Government drew applause from across the commonwealth. Per the governor’s office, some of the top priorities for the politician-populated commission will include drawing up caps on gifts for lawmakers, policies on personal use of campaign funds and procedures for congressional redistricting, among many others. But the list reads like a game called “one of these things is not like the other?” Key reform issue five of six considers a second consecutive term for Virginia governors, because “frequency of gubernatorial transitions and the impact on providing services to citizens as well as the daily operations of executive branch agencies,” according to the governor’s office. Bright minds disagree on whether Virginia’s governor should serve consecutive terms, given Virginia is the last state in the country prohibiting it. Republicans and Democrats alike have favored and criticized the idea. But one thing is clear to Richard Kelsey, an assistant dean at George Mason University School of Law: This “has nothing to do with ethics.”
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
National Stories
After striking out in Florida court, Gov. Rick Scott has hired a California law firm to fight the subpoena ordering Google to release details about private email accounts believed to be used by the governor and his staff to conduct public business. California attorney John A. Hartog filed a petition in Santa Clara County court on Friday attempting to quash the release of what could be potentially embarrassing details about the use of Gmail accounts held by the governor and two of his staff. The decision to carry the fight to California came after Tallahassee Circuit Court Judge Charles A. Francis twice ordered the governor and his lawyers to stop fighting the request for basic information from Tallahassee attorney Steven R. Andrews. Andrews is seeking documents that identify the IP address of the Gmail accounts held by the governor, first lady Ann Scott's former assistant Sarah Hansford, and Scott's former assistant Brad Piepenbrink.
Governing
Twitter, the world’s largest microblogging platform, sued the U.S. government, alleging that the Justice Department’s restrictions on what the company can say publicly about the government’s national security requests for user data violate the firm’s First Amendment rights. With its lawsuit, the San Francisco-based firm is seeking to go further than five other technology companies that earlier this year reached a settlement with the government on the permissible scope of disclosure at a time of heightened concern about the scale of government surveillance.
Washington Post
Police in Smyrna, Del., routinely violate individuals' free-speech rights, including ticketing a driver who flashed his headlights to warn of a speed trap, the Delaware ACLU alleges. The expectation of the town and the police department is that motorists will pay a ticket regardless of guilt to avoid the inconvenience of contesting the charges, according to a federal civil-rights complaint that the American Civil Liberties Union filed Monday in U.S. District Court here. "The First Amendment gives people the right to flash their lights to send a message," said Delaware ACLU's legal director, Richard Morse.
USA Today
Editorials/Columns
Did the political class in Richmond learn nothing ... absolutely nothing ... from the guilty verdicts in the McDonnell corruption trial? Sadly, given the latest bit of ethics news out of the state capital last week, we have to say no. This is the type of monkey business the average Virginian is sick and tired of. Cynics would say it’s just politics as usual, that it’s been going on since the beginning of time. Perhaps it has, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. If Gov. McAuliffe is serious about ethics reform in state government, he should start with his own office and immediately show Paul Reagan the door. If he doesn’t, well, we’ll know then that all this reform talk is just so much hot air.
News & Advance
Sen. Phillip Puckett's resignation handed control of the Senate to the GOP and effectively scuttled the McAuliffe administration's push to expand Medicaid. Leading Democrats accused Republicans of buying the Senate by offering Sen. Puckett a job with the state tobacco commission in exchange for his seat. Now it seems that Gov. McAuliffe's chief of staff was engaged in similar behavior. In June, Paul Reagan left a voicemail for Sen. Puckett and said the administration "would basically do anything" to keep him in office. When the message was released last week, the governor called it an "error in judgment." This is indicative of a much larger, more pervasive ethics problem in Virginia, one that should not be tolerated a moment longer. If Gov. McAuliffe intends to lead by example, as he has repeatedly pledged, then he must hold his most trusted advisers to a higher standard of conduct and fire his chief of staff.
Daily Press
