Transparency News 12/21/15

State and Local Stories

Members of school boards on and around the Peninsula take home salaries that roughly correspond with the number of students they serve. Pay ranges from the $420 Poquoson School Board members receive – that's $35 a meeting – to the $17,000 Newport News School Board Chairman Jeff Stodghill collects each year. In general, the larger the locality and enrollment of students in the division, the higher its school board is paid. Here's what each school board chairman, vice chairman and board member makes across the Peninsula:
Daily Press

A Richmond School Board member called for the firing of a colleague and criticized the district superintendent in a news release issued in response to a televised news report. Ninth District board member Tichi Pinkney Eppes is demanding an apology from the entire School Board for failing to denounce a Dec. 9 investigative report from WTVR News Channel 6 about a $7,000 parental involvement initiative she championed. Eppes also complained in the news release late Thursday about how a Nov. 13 story reported the fact that she and her husband had filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The general manager of WTVR, Stephen Hayes, said the station stood by its stories.
(NOTE: Hayes is a member of the VCOG Board of Directors)
Richmond Times-Dispatch


National Stories
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The Obama administration is blocking The Washington Times from obtaining detailed information about Syria’s extensive chemical weapons arsenal, which was used to kill thousands of innocents and changed the course of the country’s savage 4-year-old civil war. Critics within advocacy groups, and within the journalism establishment, have lambasted the administration for its slow, or lack of, responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Washington Times

Information that state and federal government agencies collect about train derailments, particularly those that cause crude-oil spills, is hard to find. Huge amounts of data about collisions, derailments and other accidents that happen along railroads in the United States are collected every year. Some of it is compiled by the industry and distributed directly to the public upon request. But some is buried in databases that government officials are slow to release, if at all. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation requires railroads to submit annual reports to state emergency-response officials estimating how many trains carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale region pass through each county. Yet in many states, the public is not allowed to see those reports. A request by The Dispatch to see reports for Ohio went unanswered for months.
Columbus Dispatch

Infamous pharma CEO Martin Shkreli is out on $5 million bail after being arrested Thursday on charges of securities fraud, reports the AP, but the 32-year-old is looking at 20 years if he's convicted. (Still, he's "glad to be home.") Some related reading: An innovative music fan filed what Boing Boing calls "the best FOIA ever" over the $2 million Wu-Tang Clan album that Shkreli famously bought. The fan was hoping that the FBI had seized the never-heard album during the arrest, and that he could then make it public through his freedom-of-information request. Sadly, it turns out the FBI didn't seize it.
Newser

Imagine for a moment that you're a member of a city council and you are really peeved at Donald Trump's recent idea to ban Muslim immigrants 1) because you don't agree with the idea and 2) what he said risks undermining all your hard work to build ties to your city's Muslim community. What can you do? One idea is to use your seat of power to condemn what Trump said -- and possibly the GOP front-runner himself. "Presidential candidates have the right to say dumb things," Portland, Ore., Commissioner Nick Fish recently said. "We have the right to censure them for it." Well, kind of. State and local lawmakers from Portland to New York are doing what they can to try to express their disapproval of Trump's presidential campaign and his most recent divisive statements. But they're also walking a thin, slippery line on whether elected officials can legally use their power to influence people's politics. Some might even be going over it.
Governing

A nonprofit civil rights organization – with support from the White House – will launch a website Thursday that will contain up-to-date information about nearly 20 million traffic stops made by every police department and every police officer in North Carolina over the past 15 years. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice will launch Thursday morning in Durham. The website, the first of its kind in the United States, will rely on public records on police traffic stops, vehicle searches and use of force – broken down by race and ethnicity – since 2000. The new website is part of a larger revolution in government transparency, said UNC-Chapel Hill political science professor Frank Baumgartner. 
Government Technology

What constitutes a waiver of the reporter’s privilege is largely unchartered territory for courts, leaving journalists with little case law to rely on when determining whether to respond to subpoenas. This week a California federal court shed light on the scope of waiver by recognizing a journalist’s right to refuse to produce unpublished notes even after disclosing some components of her reporting. The court also held the defendant did not overcome the qualified reporter’s privilege because it did not exhaust alternative means for obtaining the requested information.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Editorials/Columns

One of the mistakes that government officials make too often all across Virginia is to try to conduct the public’s business behind closed doors. The Portsmouth City Council this month voted 5-2 to take into secret session its discussion of legal matters that may involve a controversial Confederate monument. Television and newspaper reports said the Portsmouth closed session apparently involved legal issues about the monument some want moved and also a Confederate flag controversy in Danville. No one outside the council knows for sure how far the discussion strayed from potential litigation in Portsmouth. Maybe discussion about the monument is easier for public officials in private.  Maybe the council is simply dysfunctional and wishes to avoid the strain of appearing civil. Maybe council members don’t like to deal with public comments. Perhaps they can get away with calling their closed-door deliberation a discussion of a legal issue, thus trying to hide behind a portion of Virginia’s Swiss-cheese-riddled Freedom of Information Act often cited by elected officials shy of sunlight. But hiding from the public to talk about public issues is a classic dodge too frequently adopted by governmental bodies afraid to face their responsibilities and their constituents. They hide instead in the hush-hush let’s-hire-lawyers club.
Bob Gibson, Roanoke Times
(NOTE: Gibson is a member of the VCOG Board of Directors)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was dead wrong to veto bills that would have helped those seeking public documents and his flimsy replacement should hardly settle the matter. The governor waited  until virtually the last minute before axing two measures — one would have greatly narrowed the time for government to decide whether to appeal a Freedom of Information ruling, the other would have provided attorney’s fees to members of the public who win such court fights. The governor alleged the bills were “flawed.” Actually, his reasoning is flawed.  For starters, if the governor truly had problems with the language in the bills, there was plenty of time to work through these issues during the legislative session. These good-government initiatives, in fact, have been around in various forms for years. If the governor had the political will to see them become law, they would have become law by now.
Poughkeepsie Journal