Transparency News 12/22/14
State and Local Stories
Newly released emails show University of Virginia officials telling a Rolling Stone journalist that a sexual assault incident she was reporting on was “objectively false.” The pushback was part of a largely collegial set of interactions in the months leading up to publication of the magazine’s highly flawed Nov. 19 story “A Rape on Campus.” The story, which led with an alleged September 2012 gang rape of a freshman named Jackie at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, prompted a public uproar and a definitive university response that shut down fraternity activities, but the tale in recent weeks has come unraveled on account of inconsistencies in the gang-rape scenario presented by the magazine. More than 100 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reveal a pretty standard back-and-forth between an investigative reporter and an institution under scrutiny. The documents show that Rolling Stone fact-checker Elisabeth Garber-Paul jumps into the correspondence on Nov. 7, asking the U-Va. people a bunch of very detailed and excellent questions about procedures for handling sexual assault complaints — reporting that assumes a prominent spot in the story.
Washington Post
A proposal to allow development of a new resort along a two-mile stretch of the James River in Grove got tacit approval from a James City County Planning Commission working group Thursday. Yet almost no one but the parties involved knew about it. The discussion on the land designation and vote Thursday took place without specific mention in the working group's agenda posted before the meeting. Commissioners and the representatives of BASF said they were well aware the item would be discussed. Planning Commission chairman Rich Krapf explained that since the issue was continued from several previous working group discussions, it didn't get mentioned on the agenda except under the vague subheading "Topics for Review, Land Use Applications, Continued." "Probably in the future we should make an effort to actually itemize applications, similar to what we do in Planning Commission hearings," Krapf conceded in an interview Friday.
Virginia Gazette
Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act prevents universities from disclosing information about students found responsible for sex crimes and violence even though the federal law meant to protect student privacy explicitly tells schools to make that information public.The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, says the name of a student found responsible for a crime of violence or non-forcible sex offense is a public record along with the violation and the sanction. In Virginia, such records are exempted from the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Following the controversy generated by Rolling Stone’s tale of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, The Daily Progress made a series of open records requests, including one for complaints filed with the school’s Sexual Misconduct Board, asking that names be redacted. The school rejected the request, citing state code. “Congress can declare some documents to be confidential and states can’t contradict Congress, but they can go further and go beyond what they’ve decided is confidential,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. “As to campus sexual assaults, you would have to ask yourself why you would want things to be even more secret than Congress has decided.”
Daily Progress
Records from 10 public universities in Virginia show that only one has not expelled a student for sexual assault since 2009. Sixteen students combined were expelled from nine schools over varying periods ranging from 2009 to this year. George Mason expelled four and James Madison, three. Christopher Newport and Radford expelled two. Five others schools expelled one each. The University of Virginia expelled none. From 1998 to the beginning of the fall semester, UVa expelled 183 students for honor code violations but not one for sexual assault, according to university records. The Daily Progress requested the number of suspensions and expulsions over a three-year period from a dozen other public universities and received data from all but three — Virginia State, Norfolk State and Old Dominion. While the time periods, terms universities used and extent of information they provided made direct comparison difficult, the distinction between UVa and its counterparts was clear.
Daily Progress
The confused and lengthy effort to find the missing mug shot of a former Windsor police chief accused of embezzlement has finally yielded a booking photo — but the picture of why it was hard to get remained fuzzy until recently. Arlis "Vic" Reynolds, the former Windsor chief, was fired without explanation in December 2013. He was indicted by a grand jury on Sept. 8 and arrested by Virginia State Police in Suffolk the following day. However, Reynolds' mug shot was nowhere to be found. Law enforcement agencies routinely provide booking photos of arrestees to the public and the state's open records law lists the photos as a record that must be released. But with Reynolds' photo, several agencies pointed the finger at each other when asked for a copy of the record. The Attorney General's Office, by way of the Suffolk Police Department, ultimately released Reynolds' mug shot to the Daily Press at the end of November, more than two months after his arrest. But the photo's release didn't answer questions about why it had taken so long. Confusion over who actually controlled the record was at the heart of the delay.
Daily Press
The Shad Ranking -- Virginia politics winners and losers in 2014.
Daily Press
Bedford County Supervisor Steve Arrington said he would soon resign, over a year ago. Arrington, a contractor, cited a project in North Carolina that would soon take up too much of his time to continue his elected position when he announced, last December, he would resign early in 2014. The supervisor of more than 10 years remains at his post. Arrington says a decision will come soon on whether he will finish the final year of his term. According to meeting minutes, Arrington missed four regular board meetings this year: March 10, April 28, Aug. 11 and Sept. 22. He also missed board work sessions on March 10, April 7, April 14, April 28, May 12, June 9, June 23 and July 14, minutes show. Arrington missed the most regular meetings of any supervisor with Annie Pollard and Chairman John Sharp each missing two. “Well that doesn’t seem like a lot to me,” Arrington said, comparing the number of regular board meetings to his personal records of 43 meetings overall. “As a matter of fact it doesn’t seem like anything.”
News & Advance
A Fairfax County Circuit Court judge heard nearly two hours of argument Friday on whether he should order Fairfax County to release information to the family of John Geer in their civil lawsuit, but he did not issue a ruling. Instead, Judge Randy I. Bellows said he would write a ruling on the case later, and Bellows disclosed that he has been assigned to permanently handle the case. Bellows, a former federal prosecutor in Alexandria, asked numerous questions of both sides on the issue of whether the police should disclose information, and he further raised the issue of how he might impose a protective order on any information he did order released. Ben DiMuro, one of the Geer family’s lawyers, opposed any restriction on the information.
Washington Post
National Stories
A judge has ordered the University of Connecticut Health Center to disclose the names of researchers who were found to have violated federal guidelines for treating animals, granting an appeal from an animal advocacy group. The order Thursday by Superior Court Judge Carl Schuman reverses a ruling by Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission. Names of the researchers had been redacted from documents the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals received in response to an October 2012 Freedom of Information request. The group sought correspondence between the health center and the National Institutes of Health ‘‘regarding animal welfare problems and potential noncompliance with federal animal welfare guidelines.’’Boston Globe
Editorials/Columns
Roger Chesley, Virginian-Pilot
The Portsmouth School Board's approach to hiring Elie Bracy III was less than transparent, and that has the unfortunate effect of creating yet another unnecessary controversy and undermining public trust at a time when that trust is critical. As The Pilot's Cherise Newsome reported last week, board members met secretly five times for closed sessions with about six candidates. "Virginia law," Newsome reported, "requires public bodies to advertise the date, time and location of each official gathering, even if the body plans only to go into a closed session." The board's failure to advertise those meetings or provide notice suggest a careless disregard for the state's Freedom of Information Act - or a subversive strategy for hiring a superintendent without public scrutiny. Neither is acceptable. Improving the performance of the school division will require a communitywide effort, and that effort will require the community to be fully informed. At a minimum, that means complying with state law.
Virginian-Pilot
On the same day following the account’s release online, Ms. Sullivan flew away to an academic conference in the Netherlands, leaving the university without its top administrator in a moment of apparent crisis. By the time the story entered its next phase, following the collapse of the Rolling Stone account, the rector was stubbornly silent on a central question of transparency. These missteps deepened the unease gripping the university. But Mr. Martin in the past two days took two essential steps forward. First, he finally dashed the needless murk over whether an independent counsel’s review would be made public once completed. He said Thursday that it would. Good. This is as it should always have been. Second, at Friday’s board meeting, Mr. Martin delivered a statement composed of many things that badly needed said. He expressed the university’s collective sorrow to survivors of sexual assault as well as students, student affairs professionals, the fraternities “and the countless others on Grounds who have been wrongly maligned and traumatized by the Rolling Stone article and the reaction to it.”
Daily Progress
