Transparency News 1/2/14

Members of the General Assembly’s money committees will hold public hearings on the proposed state budget Friday at five locations throughout the state, including Virginia Tech. Members of the House Appropriations and Senate Finance committees will take comments on the two-year, $95.9 billion budget proposed by outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell, as well as McDonnell’s proposed revisions to the current budget that expires June 30.
Roanoke Times

The James City County Board of Supervisors will break with tradition Thursday by considering a policy matter during its organizational meeting. Specifically, whether to tape closed sessions. Usually the meeting is devoted to electing a chair and a vice-chair, setting the calendar, making committee appointments and reaffirming the rules of order. In addition to those routine measures, the supervisors will consider whether to tape closed sessions. The supervisors are allowed to go into closed session for a limited number of reasons, under Virginia law. Some of the most common are when they consider personnel actions (including appointments and employee reviews for the county administrator and attorney, legal action and land purchases). Now the supervisors want to tape those sessions but not televise them. Instead, the tapes would remain housed in the county attorney's office for at least four months for the supervisors to refer to.
Virginia Gazette

They’ve tolerated taunts and accusations by conspiracy theorists and movie producers, but they draw the line at respected university educators. Two former staff members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say University of Virginia professor Larry J. Sabato’s book on Kennedy sullies and besmirches the commission as incompetent and biased, even though Sabato reaches the same conclusion as the commission did.
Times-Dispatch

Part-time legislature? Not if you ask Del. Mike Watson, R-Williamsburg, as he scrambles through his final weeks representing the more than 52,000 voters in a district that slices across the Peninsula from west of Jamestown to the banks of Poquoson River – including Skiffes Creek, where his grand-dad and dad based their tugboat. Watson's been working with the General Assembly's in-house legal experts drafting bills he won't be able to carry, talking about legislation with fellow members of the Business Development Caucus he helped launch, talking with Speaker of the House Bill Howell about ways to better coordinate community colleges' to meet businesses' training needs, arranging a fundraising event for his campaign. "I'm not going away," he says. But he did promise his wife, Amy, to ratchet back a bit on legislative work after his term ends on Jan 8.
Daily Press

Riverside Health System has announced an electronic records health breach discovered in November. The security breach involved one employee, a licensed practical nurse, LPN, with Riverside Medical Group, who inappropriately accessed 919 medical records over a four-year period, according to a Riverside report. The employee has since been terminated and the health system is offering free credit monitoring for one year to all patients affected. The company reported that the system-wide breach was discovered during a random audit on Nov. 1. After an investigation, Riverside's Compliance Department determined that an employee had inappropriately accessed almost a thousand patients' social security numbers, a summary of their patient history and other information that appears in the system's electronic medical record.
Daily Press

National Stories

The South Carolina Public Interest Foundation has filed a lawsuit with the Richland County Clerk of Court against the State Ethics Commission, alleging that the body charged with enforcing state ethics laws violated the Freedom of Information Act by responding to a reporter’s request for a public record with a falsehood. The filing comes after weeks of silence from the Ethics Commission on how a letter from its staff attorney to Gov. Nikki Haley, informing Haley she had violated state ethics law by collecting campaign donations in North Carolina while traveling there at taxpayer expense, popped up six weeks after Ethics Commission Director Herb Hayden had rebuffed a reporter’s records request. Hayden had reportedly claimed that the letter had not been sent to Haley and consequently had been destroyed.
Free Times

An animal advocacy group has gone to court to get the names of researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center who were found to have violated federal guidelines for treating animals. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit last week in New Britain Superior Court, appealing a November ruling by the state's Freedom of Information Commission. The commission found UConn properly redacted the names and grant numbers from documents it released to PETA under the state's Freedom of Information law, saying the disclosure of the researchers' identities could pose a risk to their personal safety.
Sacramento Bee

A disagreement over a new Minnesota law limiting electronic access to some juvenile court records is headed for a public hearing next month. The law, which was to take effect Jan. 1, would block access via the state’s online courts system to records involving the cases of 16- or 17-year-olds charged with a felony — the only juvenile cases currently public. Paper records and hearings in those cases would remain available, as would electronic records in cases involving serious offenses.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Is a journalist committing libel if he falsely reports that a known traitor like Benedict Arnold is also a shoplifter, or a notorious mobster like John J. Gotti a dognapper? Or are some stains to a reputation so ruinous that they obliterate the risk that an offender will ever be able to sue for libel over false statements that cause further harm to it? That is the crux of the federal lawsuit Michael C. Skakel, 53, has been pursuing for the last year against the lawyer-turned-television personality Nancy Grace and others associated with her current-affairs program. Mr. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, initiated the libel suit a year ago while he was still inmate No. 301382 at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Conn. He was 10 years into a sentence of 20 years to life that he had been given for the 1975 murder of his Greenwich neighbor, Martha Moxley, when they were both 15. Public figures have trouble winning libel suits in the United States since they must also prove that their opponents acted with malice, though Mr. Skakel argues that he should not be held to the higher standards expected of public figures, especially when recent developments in his criminal case have set aside his conviction.
New York Times
 

Editorials/Columns

Roanoke Times: State Sen. Ralph Smith admits to being "a little surprised there weren't 50 ethics bills" on the first day Virginia lawmakers could prefile legislation for the upcoming General Assembly. That speaks well of the Roanoke County Republican's sincerity in pursuing modest reforms, less so of his predictive powers about the intent of fellow lawmakers. In the immediate wake of the gifts scandal that is following Gov. Bob McDonnell out of office, state politicians won't want to vote against tough ethics measures, to be sure. Lawmakers won't want to vote on meaningful reforms at all. And they will not if public interest settles into the usual post-election torpor. Virginians who want to close loopholes and hold elected officials accountable will have to let them know repeatedly that a little belt-tightening – enough to put "Voted for Ethics Reform" on the next campaign flier – will not satisfy.

Sen. Tim Kaine, Washington Post:  The principal fix needed is a dramatic restructuring of gift laws. Under current law, anyone can give anything to an elected official so long as it is reported. If the gift is from a “friend,” it need not be reported. If the gift is to an official’s spouse or other family members, it need not be reported. Virginia’s wide-open rule is justified by a smug attitude: We can trust ourselves to do the right thing, and transparency is all that is needed to keep the system honest. But since the 2011 prosecution of former Newport News delegate Phil Hamilton for bribery and extortion, the revelation that advocates of uranium mining in the commonwealth flew legislators to France and the recent controversy around gifts to the family of Gov. Bob McDonnell, we can no longer pretend Virginia’s law makes sense.