Transparency News 11/4/15

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

State and Local Stories

The University of Virginia waged an intense fight over the summer to influence the conclusions of a federal investigation into sexual violence at the school, newly obtained documents show, while the state's governor personally pressed the nation's top education official to ensure the elite public flagship would not be unfairly tarnished. Gov. Terry McAuliffe urged U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to give U.Va. a chance to review findings from the four-year investigation of the school's record on sexual assault before they were made public, saying he feared U.Va. was being denied "very basic requirements of due process." The politicians’ intervention, in correspondence The Washington Post obtained from the federal agency, came as top U-Va. officials were raising concerns about the direction of an investigation with the potential to bruise the university’s public image. The prestigious university had just endured a difficult year, with the high-profile slaying of sophomore Hannah Graham, a Rolling Stone article that accused the school of indifference to sexual assault and the bloody arrest of a black student outside a bar.
Washington Post

An investigation by the Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) uncovered no evidence that New College Institute (NCI) officials did anything improper related to the hiring of former executive director William Wampler amid a business connection between the former state senator and the institute’s board chairman at that time. “Whether anything was illegally done, OSIG did not determine that” during the investigation, said Julie Grimes, its communications manager. Rather, “it gathered information and facts in response to allegations” as it is charged to do, she said. However, the inspector general’s office wants NCI to be more transparent about its operations and decisions in the future, Grimes said.
Martinsville Bulletin

Gov. Terry McAuliffe wants state agencies to brief his office before department employees comment publicly about two deeply controversial interstate natural gas pipeline projects that have received the governor’s blessing. Brian Coy, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said McAuliffe simply wants to coordinate how state agencies will comment about the proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline and Atlantic Coast Pipeline projects. He said McAuliffe, as the state’s CEO, wants to know what his departments plan to say before they say it and ensure that state agencies will speak about the pipeline projects in the same way. “There’s no effort to muzzle anyone,” Coy said. During McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign, he emphasized plans to increase transparency in state government. The decision to share pipeline comments with the governor’s office before making them public was one outcome of an Oct. 28 meeting in Richmond that Coy said included representatives from 13 state agencies involved in the permitting process or mitigation efforts for the proposed pipelines.
Roanoke Times

The Supreme Court seems split along ideological lines as it considers whether websites that collect and sell personal data can be sued for posting false information if the errors don’t cause any specific harm. The justices heard arguments Monday in a case involving Thomas Robins, a Virginia resident who noticed that an online profile about him compiled by Internet search site Spokeo.com was filled with major mistakes. Robins, who was in his 20s, unemployed and single, found himself described as wealthy, in his 50s, holding a good job, and married with children. At issue is whether Robins can sue Spokeo for a technical violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, even though he could not show the mistakes spoiled his credit or cost him a job.
Washington Post



National Stories

The Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission will weigh in later in the month on whether or not raw collective teacher evaluation data in Connecticut should be public information, The Hartford Courant said. As more and more states make changes to teacher evaluation systems to increase effectiveness in providing meaningful feedback, more and more controversy has arisen on what the best way to do so is.
Education World

A Maryland company that runs public libraries has more than doubled in size in the past decade as governments seek savings. Bibliophile residents complain that an investment in knowledge and culture is being milked for profit. Library Systems & Services LLC is running into opposition as it seeks to add the 24 libraries in California's Kern County to its portfolio of 82 in six states, allowing the county to shed a unionized workforce of 118. The county north of Los Angeles would be the largest addition for LSSI since the firm, which is owned by Wayne, Pa.-based Argosy Capital Group Inc., got into the book business in 1997. The only coast-to-coast operator of public libraries has capitalized on a recession-driven trend of contracting out government functions. Chicago leased its 36,000 parking meters to a Morgan Stanley-led partnership in 2008. Georgia's universities last year turned over student-housing management to Corvias Group LLC for 65 years. The City Council in San Bernardino, Calif., in May voted to outsource 15 services including fire protection and park maintenance as part of a strategy to exit bankruptcy.
Governing

Media outlets covering mass shootings should refrain from identifying the attackers in order to prevent similar future attacks, a law-enforcement training and academic group in Texas that focuses on mass killings said on Monday. The request from the group, the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, or ALERRT, came at the start of its annual conference on mass shootings, and follows the recent decision of Oregon officials not to publicly name a man who had killed nine people at a community college in October. The center at Texas State University in San Marcos near the capital Austin, which trains U.S. law enforcement officers in strategies to prevent and deal with mass shootings, wants to deny attackers the fame they crave from media coverage.
Reuters