Transparency News, 12/21/21

Posted on the Legislative Information System yesterday
HB 15 (Ware)
Allows local electoral boards and general registrars to defer providing a response to a request received under the Freedom of Information Act on or after the first day of in-person absentee voting for any election and before the tenth day following the local electoral board’s certification of such election. The bill requires that notice of the deferment be provided to the requestor.

Donald W. Lemons will step down as chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court effective Dec. 31, and his colleagues have elected Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn to succeed him on Jan. 1, the court announced Monday. Lemons, 72, a former Richmond lawyer and judge, has served as chief justice for seven years. He was first elected to the position by his fellow justices on Aug. 18, 2014, to a four-year term that began Jan. 1, 2015. Lemons was elected to the state Supreme Court in 2000 for a 12-year term. His current term expires on March 15, 2024. The court’s announcement did not say why Lemons was stepping down as its 26th chief justice, but the mandatory retirement age for judges and justices in Virginia is 73.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Of the $250 million Hampton Roads Ventures had invested by the end of 2019, the last year federal records are complete, only $35.2 million was in Norfolk. Meanwhile, the housing authority’s subsidiary has funded projects in at least 15 states and the District of Columbia — grocery stores, health clinics, senior housing, a cotton mill, an aluminum plant and a hair gel company — everywhere, it seems, but Norfolk.   Those projects also haven’t created a windfall for the housing authority. Records obtained through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act show that by 2016, Hampton Roads Ventures claimed it had only $2.3 million in profits to offer NRHA. As of September, just $1.3 million of that has been transferred to the housing authority. A records request to find if more has been transferred since then is pending. NRHA has twice refused requests under the Freedom of Information Act to release the complete financial records of Hampton Roads Ventures, claiming it receives no public funds.
Virginia Mercury

Every two years around this time, we are treated to a flurry of announcements from members of Congress and state legislators that they are fed up and getting out. When you read enough of these comments, you begin to feel that we are in the middle of a mass exodus from the legislative profession, perhaps comparable to the so-called “Great Resignation” that pundits claim to be finding in the private sector. I’m no expert on the Great Resignation, or whether it even exists, but I can tell you that when it comes to politics, it’s a myth. In the 2020 election season, 90.5 percent of the members of the U.S. House sought re-election. In the Senate, it was 31 out of the 33 whose seats were up that year. Perhaps more significantly, 85 percent of the more than 7,000 sitting state legislators waged campaigns for new terms. That was the highest number in the past decade. Whatever may be going on in the American legislative process, there is zero evidence of a massive stampede to the door. What seems to me a more fruitful psychological insight is the concept of loss aversion: the idea that it is more painful to lose something one possesses than to fail in an attempt to gain it, and more powerful than the positive feelings one experiences upon winning or acquiring the same thing. I think this applies to politics just as it does to successes and failures in ordinary life. 
Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing