Transparency News 12/15/15
State and Local Stories
A lawyer for Liebherr Mining and Equipment Inc. has asked that parts of this week's hearing against a group of Chinese manufacturing firms be closed to the public and that related documents be sealed. Earlier this year, one of Liebherr's lawyers, Brett A. Spain with the Norfolk firm Willcox and Savage, asked Fisher to seal exhibits and close the courtroom to the public for parts of the hearing against those two firms, CERI Heavy Industrial Equipment Co and MCC Heavy Industrial Equipment Co. His motion said "confidential and proprietary information and trade secrets" are an exception to the general rule that court cases be open. Fisher granted the motion, but said he "takes the public's right of access very seriously" and would make the specific decisions on the sealings and closures as they come up in court. There are questions, however, on the notification to the public of the potential closures. Along with his motion, Spain submitted a "Notice of Motion to Close Portions of Damages Hearing," a one-paragraph statement to be signed by Fisher and then posted on the courthouse wall. But when the Daily Press asked Newport News Clerk of Court Gary S. Anderson to verify Monday that the notice had been posted, he said it was not. Nothing about the notice, he said, told a deputy clerk that it should be posted on a first-floor bulletin board.
Daily Press
Following one of the current membership’s most contentious debates to date, Richmond City Council advanced a plan Monday that will guide how the city redevelops 60-acres of city owned land on the Boulevard. Councilman Jonathan T. Baliles called it a “travesty,” issuing a “Hell no,” when called to vote. Councilman Parker Agelasto said he was “repulsed” by the maneuvering that led up to the vote. At issue was less the content of the measure and more the process by which its supporters were seeking to approve it: an unadvertised 11 p.m. vote. On the other side, the five member majority praised the vote as a step toward an open and public process. “I think the citizens are sick and tired of us delaying making any decisions on the Boulevard,” said Councilwoman Ellen Robertson. “I think the citizens would be glad to know that we finally made a decision and that we’re moving forward.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
In 2½ years as city auditor, Jesse Andre Thomas has struggled to complete audits in a timely fashion. Yet a majority on the City Council stand behind him, keeping him employed at a salary of more than $95,000 a year. Why is a mystery. His supporters on the council – Mayor Kenny Wright , Mark Whitaker, Paige Cherry, Curtis Edmonds and Danny Meeks – refuse to speak about his work or their expectations of him. The only sure thing is that they seem to be tolerating his lack of productivity. “I think it is incumbent upon City Council to hold their appointees accountable – period,” said Virginia Beach Councilman James Wood, who is an audit committee liaison for his city. “I don’t think he would be working for Virginia Beach anymore.” Thomas hasn’t written an audit plan for the fiscal year that began July 1. Instead, he says he is “piggybacking” off of last year’s plan. And he hasn’t completed any special projects this fiscal year, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Virginian-Pilot
National Stories
The general public will be able to search through a new U.S. drone database, which requires all recreational drone owners to begin registering later this month. The public will only be able to search the database by using a drone operator’s unique identification number that must be stamped on individual drones. A search of a specific ID number would spit out the name and address of the drone’s owner. The public, however, would not be able to search solely by a drone operator’s name or address. An industry task force had previously called on the Federal Aviation Administration to keep the database sealed off from the public, by exempting it from the Freedom of Information Act.
The Hill
One of the most important tools for The [University of Oklahoma] Daily and for journalists in Oklahoma is the Freedom of Information Act. The law forces state institutions, including OU, to make many documents available to the public upon request. All citizens can access these records, not just journalists. Here is a rundown of different records Daily staff members have accessed, or tried to access, in 2015. Parking Ticket Records. Concert Contracts. OU Regents’ Emails. Sexual Assault Records. Police Reports. Budgets.
The Oklahoma Daily
The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
New York Times
Journalists at The Las Vegas Review-Journal described the newsroom as somber and confused on Monday, as a seemingly simple question remained unanswered: Who bought the newspaper for $140 million in cash last week? Several of the paper’s journalists used Twitter to protest the new owner’s lack of transparency, including a number who sent messages that linked to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which includes a section on transparency. One journalist from The Review-Journal, who spoke, like others, on the condition of anonymity in order to describe a tense situation, said it was difficult to demand transparency from the people and institutions the paper reported on when their organization was not being forthright itself.
New York Times
In response to the conviction of former New York Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos on multiple federal corruption charges, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared on Friday that the legislature "must stop standing in the way of needed reforms." Only a few hours later he vetoed two bills designed to speed and reform Freedom of Information Law response and require the state to pay court costs incurred by FOIL users whose requests a judge finds have been improperly denied. Facing searing backlash from good government groups and accusations of hypocrisy, the governor partially reversed himself the next morning by issuing an executive order "to expedite the freedom of information law appeals process," requiring agencies to handle FOIL appeals within 90 days.
Gotham Gazette
The University of Illinois paid fired football coach Ron Zook $1.3 million while he spent a year trying a new career in banking and working on his water-skiing in Florida. The University of California paid Jeff Tedford $1.8 million while he took a year off and vacationed in New Zealand. The University of Maryland paid Ralph Friedgen $2 million while he tried out retirement, played a lot of golf and cruised the South Carolina coastline in his 24-foot whaler, “Fishing with the Fridge.” These are just a few examples of the golden parachutes that await many newly unemployed coaches in the lucrative world of major college sports, a phenomenon recently retired football coach Steve Spurrier once called “hitting that lottery ticket.” Severance pay is the top-rising expense for athletic departments at some of America’s largest public universities, according to a Washington Post review of thousands of pages of financial records from schools in the five wealthiest conferences in college sports.
Washington Post
In a push to expose the billionaires trying to influence elections, advocacy groups filed complaints Thursday against 18 television stations that aired ads for the Independence USA PAC. That political action committee, according to the complaints, is entirely funded by billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The television stations should have required that the ads identify Bloomberg by name, the advocacy groups argued. The groups—Common Cause, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Campaign Legal Center—didn’t file their complaints with the Federal Election Commission, the usual agency for regulating campaign finance issues. Instead, the groups are urging the Federal Communications Commission to aggressively use its power over the nation’s airwaves to make political spending more transparent.
National Journal
The Supreme Court spurned a Chicago Sun-Times appeal that seeks to throw out a lawsuit brought by cops resulting from its investigation of the cover-up of an involuntary manslaughter case involving the then-mayor’s nephew. As is its custom, the court didn’t give reasons Monday as to why it was letting litigation proceed in a dispute about whether the paper violated officers’ privacy when it published information about them taken from state driver license records. The cops argue that the paper thus violated a federal law that aims to protect driver license data.
Poynter
