Transparency News 1/12/2017
Thursday, January 12, 2017
State and Local Stories
State and Local Stories
Tons of bills dropped yesterday, and we’ve updated our legislative bill chart. Scroll down to the bottom of the chart to click on the “bills by committee” chart, too. It’s a work in progress since most House bills have not yet been assigned to committee.
Also, the subcommittee hearing the bill to make chemicals used in fracking exempt under FOIA is meeting this afternoon. I can’t give you an exact time because it meets after another subcommittee adjourns, and that subcommittee meets 1/2 hour after the House floor session adjourns. Here’s the meeting notice.
The Alexandria City Council voted 6 to 1 this week to limit the number of speakers at the start of its monthly Saturday hearings, an attempt to arrest the expanding length of those meetings’ public-comment period. Over the vociferous objections of first-term Mayor Allison Silberberg (D), the council agreed to allow no more than 15 speakers in the “open-mic” period that starts at 9:30 a.m. Anyone else who wants to talk about issues not on the agenda will have to wait until the end of the meeting — often five to eight hours later. Since Silberberg succeeded longtime mayor Bill Euille a year ago, the length of the public comment periods has doubled from 32 minutes, on average, to 64, according to an analysis of the public record made by Vice Mayor Justin Wilson. In January and April, the public comment periods lasted over 200 minutes, the vice mayor said.
Washington Post
The Newport News City Council likely violated the Freedom of Information Act Tuesday when it appointed 26 people to commissions and boards, but didn't name who was picked or what boards were discussed while it was in closed session, according to FOIA experts. The City Council discussed the appointments, among other things, in an hourlong closed session, then came back into an open meeting. They then voted to "ratify" the positions they had discussed in closed session without naming who they had picked or what positions were considered. The Daily Press requested a list of the appointments from the city clerk's office. City Clerk Mabel Washington emailed the list on Wednesday but said the public doesn't have access to those names — without a FOIA request — until the full minutes from Tuesday are approved at the next City Council meeting. A list or generally naming what commission or board positions were discussed would be within reason, said Alan Gernhardt, senior attorney for the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council. But the way the City Council voted on Tuesday sounded like a violation of FOIA to Gernhardt because they didn't provide a general summary, which is required by law.
Daily Press
National Stories
The executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government really took to heart Sen. Brad Hoylman’s Friday request for an “expedited” advisory opinion on the question of whether or not the state Senate’s new rule barring the use of cellphones as audio, video or photographic recording devices within the chamber and its public galleries without the permission of the Senate secretary violates the state’s Open Meeting Law. Robert Freeman’s conclusion, in a five-page letter to Hoylman dated Monday, is that the rule is clearly contrary to state law. The letter — which backs up comments Freeman made to journalists last week in the wake of Wednesday’s adoption of the chamber’s rules, including the cellphone ban — notes the decades of legal precedent that defines what constitutes a “public body” and requires that such bodies must make their proceedings available for photography, audio and video recording and broadcast.
Times Union
Jini Kim’s relationship with Medicaid is business and personal. Her San Francisco start-up, Nuna, while working with the federal government, has built a cloud-computing database of the nation’s 74 million Medicaid patients and their treatment. Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income people, is administered state by state. Extracting, cleaning and curating the information from so many disparate and dated computer systems was an extraordinary achievement, health and technology specialists say. This new collection of data could inform the coming debate on Medicaid spending. Andrew M. Slavitt, acting director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described the cloud database as “near historic.” Largely because Medicaid information resides in so many state-level computing silos, Mr. Slavitt explained, “we’ve never had a systemwide view across the program.”
New York Times
Also, the subcommittee hearing the bill to make chemicals used in fracking exempt under FOIA is meeting this afternoon. I can’t give you an exact time because it meets after another subcommittee adjourns, and that subcommittee meets 1/2 hour after the House floor session adjourns. Here’s the meeting notice.
The Alexandria City Council voted 6 to 1 this week to limit the number of speakers at the start of its monthly Saturday hearings, an attempt to arrest the expanding length of those meetings’ public-comment period. Over the vociferous objections of first-term Mayor Allison Silberberg (D), the council agreed to allow no more than 15 speakers in the “open-mic” period that starts at 9:30 a.m. Anyone else who wants to talk about issues not on the agenda will have to wait until the end of the meeting — often five to eight hours later. Since Silberberg succeeded longtime mayor Bill Euille a year ago, the length of the public comment periods has doubled from 32 minutes, on average, to 64, according to an analysis of the public record made by Vice Mayor Justin Wilson. In January and April, the public comment periods lasted over 200 minutes, the vice mayor said.
Washington Post
The Newport News City Council likely violated the Freedom of Information Act Tuesday when it appointed 26 people to commissions and boards, but didn't name who was picked or what boards were discussed while it was in closed session, according to FOIA experts. The City Council discussed the appointments, among other things, in an hourlong closed session, then came back into an open meeting. They then voted to "ratify" the positions they had discussed in closed session without naming who they had picked or what positions were considered. The Daily Press requested a list of the appointments from the city clerk's office. City Clerk Mabel Washington emailed the list on Wednesday but said the public doesn't have access to those names — without a FOIA request — until the full minutes from Tuesday are approved at the next City Council meeting. A list or generally naming what commission or board positions were discussed would be within reason, said Alan Gernhardt, senior attorney for the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council. But the way the City Council voted on Tuesday sounded like a violation of FOIA to Gernhardt because they didn't provide a general summary, which is required by law.
Daily Press
National Stories
The executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government really took to heart Sen. Brad Hoylman’s Friday request for an “expedited” advisory opinion on the question of whether or not the state Senate’s new rule barring the use of cellphones as audio, video or photographic recording devices within the chamber and its public galleries without the permission of the Senate secretary violates the state’s Open Meeting Law. Robert Freeman’s conclusion, in a five-page letter to Hoylman dated Monday, is that the rule is clearly contrary to state law. The letter — which backs up comments Freeman made to journalists last week in the wake of Wednesday’s adoption of the chamber’s rules, including the cellphone ban — notes the decades of legal precedent that defines what constitutes a “public body” and requires that such bodies must make their proceedings available for photography, audio and video recording and broadcast.
Times Union
Jini Kim’s relationship with Medicaid is business and personal. Her San Francisco start-up, Nuna, while working with the federal government, has built a cloud-computing database of the nation’s 74 million Medicaid patients and their treatment. Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income people, is administered state by state. Extracting, cleaning and curating the information from so many disparate and dated computer systems was an extraordinary achievement, health and technology specialists say. This new collection of data could inform the coming debate on Medicaid spending. Andrew M. Slavitt, acting director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described the cloud database as “near historic.” Largely because Medicaid information resides in so many state-level computing silos, Mr. Slavitt explained, “we’ve never had a systemwide view across the program.”
New York Times
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