Transparency News, 12/20/2022

Tuesday
December 20, 2022

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state & local news stories

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8news first reported on polygraph tests within Richmond's jail last Tuesday after receiving several complaints from sheriff's deputies. Now, the leader of the jail, Sheriff Antionette Irving, is justifying her decision to force staff members to take them. "We polygraph employees because of safety and security," Irving said. "We have a right to polygraph. We have a right to ask the questions." She said polygraph tests are standard practice during ongoing investigations as a way to "know if things are coming through the front door, the back door, or the mail." However, 8news received inside reports that the tests were to find out whether deputies were speaking to the media about issues going on within the jail.
WRIC

At a meeting Monday, the Dayton Town Council appointed Bob Holton as interim town manager. The former longtime Bridgewater administrator replaced Angela Lawrence, who was Dayton's town manager for about three-and-a-half years and resigned last week. Holton was the only person Town Council interviewed Monday evening, for about 20 minutes as council members met in a closed session. When Lawrence resigned, she said she enjoyed working for the town and loved its people, but noted the job became "increasingly more difficult" and that recent Town Council meetings got "much more divisive." Holton noted that he was able to diffuse tense situations when he first started in Bridgewater, and could do the same in Dayton. "That's probably one of the reasons they wanted me," he said. "Bridgewater is a great community and now, the meetings run very smoothly. But once upon a time, meetings were a nightmare, and you can get an ulcer just anticipating them. We not only survived that, but learned how to deal with that, and accommodate people that have different opinions."
Daily News Record

Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906. “This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”What the county had to do, because Virginia law requires it, was run a legal notice tucked among the ads and classifieds in several weekly print editions of The Mecklenburg Sun. Even that, Jones had warned in an email to Microsoft and the county, would “risk” the “chance of a local family member coming forward.” The second week the notice ran, in November of 2014, the paper published a front-page story about a controversy over new helmets for the high school football team following the death of a player from blunt force trauma. It appeared under the byline Mike Moseley. Moseley is a staff writer. He is also Stephen Moseley’s great-grandson.
ProPublica
 

editorials & columns

"Government officials have increasingly come to the realization that obstructing the public’s business bears almost no consequence."

Last week, the Richmond Sheriff’s Office responded to a Richmond Times-Dispatch Freedom of Information Act request for payroll records with a well-worn tactic increasingly deployed by government agencies across Virginia: obstruction by charging inflated fees. Yes, the cost in staff time devoted to FOIA requests is real. And reporters have long had to negotiate and work with government officials to obtain public records. Sometimes, the requests are unwieldy and too broad, and wind up consuming inordinate amounts of staff time and resources. Still, that’s not the real problem. The abuse of FOIA is symptomatic of something more worrisome: Government officials have increasingly come to the realization that obstructing the public’s business bears almost no consequence. In these days of reality-bending politics, there are no repercussions for denying the public access to public records. FOIA fights aren’t sexy, and they get lost in a crowded media market. But it matters. A growing lack of accountability and transparency breeds corruption and contempt for the democratic process. If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make sound? One can argue the philosophical points, but if the trees keep falling — eventually there will be no forest.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

When the Mercury’s Graham Moomaw filed a public records request with Virginia State Police for administrative documents and background checks on Austin Lee Edwards, the agency chose to “exercise its statutory discretion” and hide the documents from taxpayer view. Pressed for a reason for withholding information about Edwards, he was told that under state law, the agency isn’t required to comment further. The VSP will only concede the obvious: that “human error” is to blame for the agency missing an incident in Edwards’s not-too-distant past during his hiring process. The agency said that no red flags emerged during his pre-employment background checks. The Los Angeles Times, however, revealed that the incident referenced was a 2016 mental health crisis in which Edwards threatened to kill his father and was ordered hospitalized by a court. WTVR-TV in Richmond reported last week that Edwards revealed during a pre-employment interview that he had checked himself into a mental health facility that same year. On Thursday, Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked the Office of the State Inspector General to investigate Edwards’ hiring. Stonewalling something like this is short-sighted and futilebecause of the likelihood that those details will be pried loose, if not by unhappy political leaders then in the discovery process of a wrongful death lawsuit. Even if the case doesn’t go to trial, such explosive material has been known to find the hands of enterprising journalists. State law doesn’t require that the records of the individual in question be withheld. That was a choice. And it’s a choice that only serves to undermine the trust and confidence in law enforcement that is essential for the police to effectively do their jobs.
Bob Lewis, Virginia Mercury