Transparency News 1/28/16

State and Local Stories

Yesterday, a subcommittee of House Counties, Cities and Towns took four public notice bills, rolled them into one bill and will send the package to JLARC for a cost/benefit analysis of keeping notices in newspapers.

The same subcommittee sent a bill dictating how much public comment would be required at public meetings to the FOIA Council for further study. The version of the bill sent for study would require three minutes of speaking per person per agenda item for every agenda item.

The full House Courts of Justice Committee further advanced the bill that would grant immunity from a defamation suit to citizens speaking at public meetings. The thing is, the original bill was changed to eliminate the defamation reference and instead is now only a bill dealing with attorneys fees.

Today, 18 FOIA bills will be heard by the House General Laws FOIA subcommittee. You can read VCOG’s position on 16 of them (the other two were added to the docket after this chart was prepared) on VCOG’s website.

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Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones was included in at least 107 email messages to and from his public works director related to construction of a new campus for the church headed by the mayor, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails, released Wednesday, also show that the director’s work on the construction of the new First Baptist Church of South Richmond location during city hours went well beyond the 38 hours that the city auditor’s office initially estimated he spent on church construction-related conference calls. A review by the Richmond Times-Dispatch found that the director, Emmanuel O. Adediran, used his city email account during work hours to update church leaders on the progress of the construction in Chesterfield County, distribute engineering and planning documents, coordinate with Chesterfield’s planning and inspection departments, and correspond with contractors.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Vice Adm. Ted "Twig" Branch was barred from classified information when the Navy learned his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation. More than two years later, Branch has neither been charged nor cleared, but his access to classified information remains blocked. It's an awkward arrangement for Branch as head of the Navy's intelligence division, akin to sending a warship into battle with its skipper stuck onshore.
Virginian-Pilot

In a day and age when so much personnel information is stored on computer databases, Pulaski is trying to protect the information from falling into the wrong hands by requiring employees to sign confidentiality agreements. Town Manager Shawn Utt stressed that the town hasn’t had any issues with information being inappropriately used, but “it would be good operational protocol” to take such action. The issue came up as the result of the town purchasing new finance software. Utt said council should either choose to have all town employees sign the agreement or just those who have access to personal records of citizens and other employees. Council believes it would be best to require all employees to sign one.
Southwest Times


National Stories
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The Orlando Police Department will release the race, sex, and age of sexual offenders, as well as where and when sexual assaults took place, on an open data portal it plans to launch in March. The website will feature location-specific maps, graphs, and detailed spreadsheets. OPD is the only agency in Florida planning to release such data, and one of thirty agencies in the country, as part of a White House Program called the Police Data Initiative.
WMFE

In offices the world over, email servers are gathering dust as workers flock to group instant-messaging platforms to communicate. Slack, one of the most popular platforms, lets users in a team send messages to one another, individually or in groups. It plays nicely with other online services, a feature which has helped it take off among media and technology companies. The company says its platform has attracted more than 2 million active users—including hundreds here at The Atlantic—and it’s valued at nearly $3 billion. Recently, the government, which often lags behind on technology, has begun to catch on. According to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, the General Services Administration, NASA, and the State Department are all experimenting with using Slack for internal communication. The move is a potential boon to government productivity (notwithstanding the tide of emoji it will likely bring into the work lives of our nation’s public servants). But it could also be a threat to a vital tool for government accountability.
The Atlantic

The Flint water crisis loomed large over a hearing Tuesday on a bill that would provide an exemption from Michigan's Freedom of Information Act laws for some public documents surrounding cyber security and critical energy infrastructure. “We’re trying to strike a balance here to protect against people with evil intent,” said the bill’s sponsor state Rep. Kurt Heise, R-Plymouth. The bill would allow companies to share information with state regulators about cyber security and critical energy infrastructure issues without fear that the documents would become public. That’s important, said State Police Inspector Matt Bolger, for companies who want to alert authorities about hacking attempts without that information getting out to the public and spooking shareholders.
Government Technology


Editorials/Columns

Until now, one of the unsung heroes of the Flint water saga was Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor Marc Edwards, who was one of the first to raise alarms. Consider him now sung: The Washington Post recently profiled the good professor who, along with his colleagues, filed FOIA requests, did water testing on his own and set up a website to keep the public informed — and spent a lot of his own money to do it. His experience serves as a reminder that the Freedom of Information Act applies not just to the press. It secures the public’s right to know — and the public includes not only reporters and editors but citizens interested in keeping tabs on their government.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

THE VIRGINIA Supreme Court proved last year that it is no friend to the cause of transparency in government. In September, the court delivered a ruling that punched a hole in the commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act. The decision, authored by Justice Cleo Powell, allows officials to withhold entire documents that contain any sensitive information rather than redacting them for release, as was the prior protocol. Legislation introduced by Sen. Scott Surovell, a Democrat, and Del. Jim LeMunyon, a Republican, aims to reverse that misstep by the state judiciary. Their bills would allow governments to withhold “only those portions of the public record containing information subject to an exclusion under FOIA.” All other portions of the public record, they say, “shall be disclosed.” The legislation should be passed without delay.
Virginian-Pilot

Transparency matters, especially in our state legislature, where much power is wielded in near darkness. Last year, House of Delegates committees and subcommittees did not record votes on 76 percent of the bills they killed, and “scores of bills” didn’t receive hearings, according to a report by Transparency Virginia, a state watchdog group. This year, Del. Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge, has aimed to end this travesty by introducing a bill that requires every piece of legislation receive a recorded vote in a committee or subcommittee. If passed and signed into law, committee chairs would no longer have the power to table what they did not want to talk about, much less vote for.
News Leader