Transparency News 12/30/19

Monday
December 30, 2019

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state & local news stories

Del. Mark Levine has introduced a bill to require the House and Senate to stream (with closed captioning), record and archive all committee and subcommittee meetings.
HB 182 — on VCOG’s legislative tracking chart

A prominent University of Virginia law professor — and husband of the university’s former president — has laid down a constitutional challenge to the General Assembly and its practice of appointing its own members to policy boards created within the state’s executive branch of government. In a treatise bluntly titled “Legislators on Executive-Branch Boards Are Unconstitutional, Period,” professor Douglas Laycock says the General Assembly violates the Constitution of Virginia by appointing its members to executive boards, including those governing higher education institutions and issuing state grants for economic development. The treatise, to be published in the next issue of the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, also challenges a state law that grants exceptions to the constitutional prohibition for 21 state policy boards as “clearly unconstitutional.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

stories of national interest

Federal contractors may have lost certainty that the Labor Department can keep their workforce diversity reports out of the public domain by shutting down FOIA requests, after a federal judge ordered the agency to release that data from 10 companies. Judge Kandis A. Westmore of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled earlier this month in favor of journalist Will Evans with the Center for Investigative Reporting, which sued the DOL in April for declining to turn over companies’ workforce demographic data in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The businesses include Gilead Sciences Inc., Docusign Inc., and Oracle America Inc.
Bloomberg

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Friday last week that settlements reached in malpractice claims against companies that provide care for inmates in Illinois prison are in the public record and can be FOIA requested. The ruling ends a 4 year long battle between Springfield newspaper Illinois Times and the Illinois Department of Corrections after the paper asked for a copy of a settlement reached in the case of Alfonso Franco, a prisoner at Taylorville Correctional Center inmate who died of colon cancer in 2012 after the company contracted by the state of Illinois – Wexford Health Services – failed to provide him adequate care.
WLDS

The New York City Department of Investigation has a backlog of over 5,550 background checks to do on new employees — about the same number as it faced two years ago, records obtained by the Daily News show. The department is behind on background checks for 5,644 city workers across 77 agencies as of the end of October, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request.
New York Daily News