Transparency News 1/23/17
Monday, January 23, 2017
State and Local Stories
State and Local Stories
The Senate General Laws Committee will meet this afternoon to hear the recommendations put forth by the subcommittee last week on eight FOIA bills. Here’s a recap of that subcommittee meeting.
The meeting is scheduled for 45 minutes after adjournment of the Senate floor session. Here is the docket.
Also meeting today — 30 minutes after adjournment of the House — is the criminal law subcommittee that will hear a bill that would close of information on jurors, including names and addresses, to anyone but the lawyers for the case.
Transparency Virginia statement on support for HB1677, praise for measure to archive House session videos.
The financial plight of Petersburg, just 23 miles south of the state Capitol, has the attention of an influential group of state officials and lawmakers concerned about the potential for other local governments to slip into fiscal distress without their awareness. Former Richmond City Manager Robert C. Bobb, whose Washington consulting firm is working under contract to sort out the Cockade City’s messy finances, is scheduled to appear before the House Appropriations Committee this week, along with the city’s financial consultant. Bobb was part of an informal work group that met in Richmond last week to discuss potential ways to improve state tracking of fiscal stress among local governments.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
National Stories
President Trump has no intention of releasing his tax returns, his senior counselor said on Sunday, ruling out a step he had said he would take once an Internal Revenue Service audit was completed. “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” the counselor, Kellyanne Conway, said in an interview on the ABC program “This Week.”
New York Times
For years, Queen Creek, Ariz., was booming with a steady influx of families moving to the community outside Phoenix. That all came to a halt in 2006 when town officials started noticing a dramatic drop-off in housing construction. The eventual nationwide housing market collapse resulted in round after round of mid-year budget reductions, followed by years of cuts to the city's workforce. The town consolidated or eliminated multiple departments. An entire police beat was cut. And the public employees who were left saw their hours or pay reduced as revenues continued to decline. While few local governments across the country felt the recession's effects quite to the level that Queen Creek did, most were forced to make some form of payroll reductions. Going on nearly a decade since the start of the recession, localities in many parts of the country have since restored public payrolls to prior levels. But some still employ far fewer workers than they did before the downturn. (Click to see where Virginia lands on the scale of overall percentage change.)
Governing
Open government advocates and Iowa’s state universities are poised for a fight over whether federal copyright laws pre-empt state laws requiring government agencies to provide public access to state-generated documents and materials. The staff of the Iowa Public Information Board has found the University of Iowa broke Iowa’s public records law by refusing to share its photos and video from the historic 2008 floods with a Cedar Rapids documentary filmmaker. The UI asserts copyright law protects the creative works of its employees. But open government advocates say allowing the UI to keep these records confidential may open the door to agencies shielding all sorts of public records.
The Gazette
Editorials/Columns
LAST YEAR, a reform-minded lawmaker in Virginia introduced a bill to require that all legislation be subject to an on-the-record vote, up or down, that would record each legislator’s position. The bill died on an unrecorded voice vote. That’s a small but telling example of the contempt for accountability in Richmond, where a wave of ethics reforms following the disgrace and downfall of former governor Robert F. McDonnell did little to enhance legislative transparency. Having been in business since 1619, the General Assembly prides itself on being the oldest continuous lawmaking body in the New World. You’d think it had learned a thing or two over four centuries about what it owes to its constituents. Apparently not. In 2015, when a nonpartisan, volunteer group called Transparency Virginia surveyed how the sausage is made in Virginia’s legislature, it found that most legislation in the House of Delegates died on unrecorded voice votes. By killing legislation in that manner, lawmakers avoid awkward and embarrassing votes that might come back to haunt them. Better to leave no fingerprints, they reckon, and keep would-be rivals — and constituents — in the dark.
Washington Post
The meeting is scheduled for 45 minutes after adjournment of the Senate floor session. Here is the docket.
Also meeting today — 30 minutes after adjournment of the House — is the criminal law subcommittee that will hear a bill that would close of information on jurors, including names and addresses, to anyone but the lawyers for the case.
Transparency Virginia statement on support for HB1677, praise for measure to archive House session videos.
The financial plight of Petersburg, just 23 miles south of the state Capitol, has the attention of an influential group of state officials and lawmakers concerned about the potential for other local governments to slip into fiscal distress without their awareness. Former Richmond City Manager Robert C. Bobb, whose Washington consulting firm is working under contract to sort out the Cockade City’s messy finances, is scheduled to appear before the House Appropriations Committee this week, along with the city’s financial consultant. Bobb was part of an informal work group that met in Richmond last week to discuss potential ways to improve state tracking of fiscal stress among local governments.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
National Stories
President Trump has no intention of releasing his tax returns, his senior counselor said on Sunday, ruling out a step he had said he would take once an Internal Revenue Service audit was completed. “The White House response is that he’s not going to release his tax returns,” the counselor, Kellyanne Conway, said in an interview on the ABC program “This Week.”
New York Times
For years, Queen Creek, Ariz., was booming with a steady influx of families moving to the community outside Phoenix. That all came to a halt in 2006 when town officials started noticing a dramatic drop-off in housing construction. The eventual nationwide housing market collapse resulted in round after round of mid-year budget reductions, followed by years of cuts to the city's workforce. The town consolidated or eliminated multiple departments. An entire police beat was cut. And the public employees who were left saw their hours or pay reduced as revenues continued to decline. While few local governments across the country felt the recession's effects quite to the level that Queen Creek did, most were forced to make some form of payroll reductions. Going on nearly a decade since the start of the recession, localities in many parts of the country have since restored public payrolls to prior levels. But some still employ far fewer workers than they did before the downturn. (Click to see where Virginia lands on the scale of overall percentage change.)
Governing
Open government advocates and Iowa’s state universities are poised for a fight over whether federal copyright laws pre-empt state laws requiring government agencies to provide public access to state-generated documents and materials. The staff of the Iowa Public Information Board has found the University of Iowa broke Iowa’s public records law by refusing to share its photos and video from the historic 2008 floods with a Cedar Rapids documentary filmmaker. The UI asserts copyright law protects the creative works of its employees. But open government advocates say allowing the UI to keep these records confidential may open the door to agencies shielding all sorts of public records.
The Gazette
Editorials/Columns
LAST YEAR, a reform-minded lawmaker in Virginia introduced a bill to require that all legislation be subject to an on-the-record vote, up or down, that would record each legislator’s position. The bill died on an unrecorded voice vote. That’s a small but telling example of the contempt for accountability in Richmond, where a wave of ethics reforms following the disgrace and downfall of former governor Robert F. McDonnell did little to enhance legislative transparency. Having been in business since 1619, the General Assembly prides itself on being the oldest continuous lawmaking body in the New World. You’d think it had learned a thing or two over four centuries about what it owes to its constituents. Apparently not. In 2015, when a nonpartisan, volunteer group called Transparency Virginia surveyed how the sausage is made in Virginia’s legislature, it found that most legislation in the House of Delegates died on unrecorded voice votes. By killing legislation in that manner, lawmakers avoid awkward and embarrassing votes that might come back to haunt them. Better to leave no fingerprints, they reckon, and keep would-be rivals — and constituents — in the dark.
Washington Post
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