Transparency News 12/9/19

Monday
December 9, 2019

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state & local news stories

“City spokeswoman Julie Hill said such questions would not be answered unless they were submitted as a Freedom of Information Act records request so that the city could develop a cost estimate for answering them.”

Five months after the shooting at a Virginia Beach municipal building, 450 city employees have filed for workers’ compensation benefits related to the shooting. The mountain of claims represents the immense psychological and emotional toll the attack has had on the staff. Given that only four survivors were reported wounded, the vast majority of claims are for mental health reasons. Officials would not say how many claims there were for physical versus psychological injuries or how many had been accepted for benefits from each category. The city also wouldn’t say the amount it has paid so far. City spokeswoman Julie Hill said such questions would not be answered unless they were submitted as a Freedom of Information Act records request so that the city could develop a cost estimate for answering them.
The Virginian-Pilot

The gun rights sanctuary pledge on the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors agenda Tuesday is expected to dominate the meeting, but another issue also is likely to draw serious discussion. The meeting agenda includes several proposed amendments that would ban county employees from continuing in that position if elected to the board in the future, among other restrictions. The issue arose earlier this year after Supervisor Kevin Marshall was hired to a position in the county’s economic development office, which has its budget set by the board. Marshall had already been a longtime county employee as a firefighter.
The Free Lance-Star

Frederick County Board of Supervisors meetings will now stream live on the county government website, and meeting videos will be archived on the site as well. “This portal is something we’ve been talking about for some time and the streaming of the Board of Supervisors meetings is the first step,” county Public Information Officer Karen Vacchio in a media release. “Next we will be working on having our Planning Commission meetings and our cable channel streaming.” Currently, the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission meetings are broadcast live on Comcast Channel 16, which is the Frederick County government channel. The meetings also are available for viewing after the meeting on the county’s YouTube channel. Streaming the meetings on the website will allow a much larger audience to see them, Vacchio said.
The Winchester Star

stories of national interest

The Detroit News started reporting this story with a simple question: Foreclosures are down dramatically in Detroit, but how are residents doing on the low-interest repayment plans designed nearly five years ago to help avoid thousands more from losing their homes? To answer that question, reporters pieced together more than half a dozen sources of data relating to roughly 12,000 properties, some of the first to enroll in the plans. Acquiring the data was a months-long task. This summer, Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree’s office billed The News $235,000 for aggregated countywide debt data that was already publicly accessible and free for individual properties. Instead of paying the fee, the paper partnered with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting to “scrape” the data needed for this analysis from a county website. 
The Detroit News

You can become a UFO researcher starting with a new display at the National Archives Museum. In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the end of Project Blue Book, the code name for the Air Force program that investigated UFO sightings, the National Archives Museum started displaying a selection of Project Blue Book records Thursday. The records are a just sample from thousands of pages of unclassified records and items related to Project Blue Book that the National Archives has in its possession. Including things like unedited, unaltered home movies used in the investigation that people from all over the United States shot between 1952 and 1967. “Serious research much also include the many thousands of pages of documents released over the years via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), UFO historian and author Richard Dolan said. “One can learn much more by studying the declassified literature on this matter via a number of public sources and websites.”
WJLA

Parents of a late 21-year-old Mississippi man are suing a city official they say invited the public to view autopsy photos of their son and discuss the case. The lawsuit by Todd and Rae Andreacchio filed Tuesday accuses the chief administrative officer of Meridian of invading their privacy and intentionally inflicting emotional distress, according to The Meridian Star. Such efforts by Richie McAlister were conducted in an attempt to lead the public to conclude their son took his own life, the lawsuit states. 
ABC News

The type of helicopter that crashed in a central Minnesota farm field Thursday is the military’s long-running workhorse with a reputation of reliability. While the National Guard helicopter crash is still under investigation, questions surfaced Thursday about the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk involved in the incident. The U.S. military does not publish aviation accident data, but through a Freedom of Information Act request, Defense News compiled a database of all military aviation mishaps from 2011 to 2017. Of the 98 UH-60 Black Hawk mishaps reported during that time period on L-model and M-model Black Hawks — including combat and noncombat situations — about 25 could be related to mechanical problems, but only three resulted in significant damage or loss of life.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
 

“Instead of paying the fee, the paper partnered with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting to ‘scrape’ the data needed for this analysis from a county website.”