Transparency News 1/9/14

Thursday, January 9, 2014
 
State and Local Stories

 

Don’t forget to check out our bill chart. Roughly 45 bills are posted there and there will likely be more added, as bills will continue to be posted to the legislative website every day for the next week or so.
Virginia Coalition for Open Government

Note: Oral arguments in ATI v. UVA are today at 11:30. This is the case where ATI has been trying to use FOIA to gain access from UVA to the emails of climate scientist and former UVA professor Michael Mann. The dispute dates back three years. Now the court is being asked to decide (1) whether the records are exempt, and (2) whether requesters can be charged for the time spent searching for records that aren’t produced.

Gov. Bob McDonnell used his farewell address to the state to remind Virginians of the accomplishments during his four years as governor and to apologize for the “problems and the pain” caused by his involvement in a gifts scandal. “I’m not perfect,” he said in a lengthy speech before the 2014 General Assembly that began Wednesday.
Times-Dispatch

A member of the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors will be working for Delegate R. Steven Landes during the 2014 session. Chatham-Blairs Supervisor Brenda Bowman will serve as a committee assistant for Landes, R-Augusta County, who represents the 25th District. Bowman has worked as a legislative assistant in the House and Senate for eight years. She has worked for Sen. Bill Stanley, Delegate Charles Poindexter, former Delegate Melanie Rapp and former Delegate and current U.S. Rep. Robert Hurt. Bowman said in a prepared statement that she looks forward to serving in her new capacity and observing the legislative process from a different perspective.
Register & Bee

Loudoun County school officials offered a more detailed list Wednesday of the personal student and staff information that was publicly accessible online due to a security breachby a software vendor in late 2013. Technology services staff combed through each of the 1,286 links that were left without password protection on an emergency management planning Web site maintained by contractor Risk Solutions International. The links contained information from all 84 schools, according to a school system statement. Most schools uploaded “directory information” about students, including names, addresses, telephone numbers, date and place of birth, dates of attendance and course schedules.
Washington Post

National Stories

A New York appellate court ruled that a blogger may remain anonymous, thereby preventing a political candidate from bringing a defamation suit against him or her. The blogger, known as “Q-Tip,” wrote an article titled “Would You Buy A Used Car From These Men?,” which said the candidates “think you aren’t smart enough to see past the lies and downright criminal actions taken by their backers, the Croton Republican Committee.” The court held on Dec. 26 that a reasonable reader, given the context of the blog and the contentious election, would conclude these statements reflected the blogger’s opinion, not fact.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

A top aide to Gov. Chris Christie called for the closure of local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge that caused a New Jersey town to become gridlocked for days, the New York Times reports.The revelations, based on newly-released emails, is the clearest sign so far that a week of September traffic jams that mired Fort Lee, N.J. were intentionally ordered by Christie's administration. Christie had adamantly insisted that his staff and campaign were not involved in the lane closures. But according to emails obtained by the newspaper, his deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly signaled to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that the lanes -- connecting local traffic to the bridge -- should be closed.
Governing

State officials are continuing to deny access to a publicly funded study examining Maine’s welfare system and the possible impacts of a Medicaid expansion here. The study, commissioned on a no-bid contract for $925,200 by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, is being completed by the Alexander Group, a Rhode Island-based consulting company led by former Rhode Island and Pennsylvania welfare chief Gary Alexander. The first part of the report, which had a target due date of Dec. 1 was submitted to the department on Dec. 16, but requests for access to it under the state’s public records laws have been denied or ignored by DHHS officials.
Bangor Daily News

The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld a judge's order preventing victims of the Aurora movie theater attack from learning more about the investigation. Fourteen survivors of and relatives of victims slain in the attack asked the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court's ruling that exhibits displayed during earlier hearings in the case should not be released to them. The victims have sued the owner of the movie theater, Cinemark, and say they need the exhibits to help prove their case. The exhibits, like nearly all of the evidence in the case, have not been released publicly because of a gag order in place until the criminal case ends. However, the exhibits — which include things like photographs, police reports and audio recordings — were displayed briefly or discussed during an extensive and public evidentiary hearing one year ago.
The Denver Post

Two senators introduced legislation yesterday to make settlements with federal enforcement agencies more transparent. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the Truth in Settlements Act will require greater public disclosure about agreements and it will create greater accountability concerning the actual value of deals made with federal agencies.
Blog of LegalTimes

A doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing the Central Intelligence Agency over documents about the late South African president and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. After Mandela’s death on Dec. 5, MIT student and historian Ryan Shapiro sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency requesting records that mentioned Mandela. The other agencies replied in some fashion to the FOIA requests, according to Shapiro's lawyer Jeffrey Light, a solo practitioner in Washington. The NSA refused to confirm or deny the existence of records, known as a "Glomar response." The FBI granted expedited processing and the DIA denied expedited processing, but had yet to respond to the substance of his request.
Blog of LegalTimes

Arkansas Lt. Gov. Mark Darr refused Tuesday to resign over ethics violations tied to his campaign and office spending despite repeated calls from the state's top officials to quit, prompting a key member of his own party to declare Darr's impeachment by the state House "inevitable." Darr, a Republican, acknowledged to the Ethics Commission last week that he broke state ethics and campaign laws 11 times since 2010 and agreed to pay $11,000 in fines. Darr has blamed the violations on meaningless oversights and contends he didn't profit from them personally. The Ethics Commission last week said it found probable cause that Darr made personal use of $31,572.74 in campaign funds, received excess contributions to retire his campaign debt, didn't maintain adequate records, failed to itemize loan repayments and accepted improper reimbursement for travel expenses. A separate legislative audit last month cited more than $12,000 in improper expenses incurred by Darr's office.
Politico

Within hours of a call for more transparency in a more than two-year investigation into state campaign finance practices, the Delaware Department of Justice released three documents Tuesday related to the hiring of special prosecutor E. Norman Veasey, including the 2011 contract for legal services. State Republican Party Chairman Charles Copeland on Monday asked for more nuts and bolts details regarding Veasey’s recently released 101-page report. Copeland called for Attorney General Beau Biden to release any documents, including any agreements Veasey may have had with the state.
The News Journal

Looking for a job in big data? Want to know about events related to the field? Need access to, well, big data sets? It’s all in one place now at MassBigData.org, which the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative unveiled this week. The new site is the latest effort in Governor Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts Big Data Initiative, which he launched in May 2012 with the goal to make the Bay State a hub of the emerging industry. Big data refers to the analysis of large quantities of information that is hard to digest but can yield meaningful conclusions. A big data company might log every click by every visitor to an online shopping site, for instance, and use the results to make the site more user-friendly. Already, there are indicators that Massachusetts appeals to big data entrepreneurs. The founders of a startup called Hadapt, for instance, met at Yale but chose to base their young company in Cambridge because of the area’s deep talent pool. When Hadapt was named one of the state’s most promising startups by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council over the summer, Justin Borgman, chief executive, said, “Boston has a real opportunity to be one of the epicenters of big data — or the epicenter of big data.”
Boston Globe
 

Editorials/Columns

Daily Press: Last year, citizens in the Newport District of Isle of Wight County circulated a petition seeking the ouster of the supervisor who represents them, Byron "Buzz" Bailey. Two commonwealth's attorneys went on the record suggesting that Mr. Bailey owed it to his constituents to resign. He chose to stay. And last week, in a move that defies all propriety and sensitivity, the Board of Supervisors elected him as chairman. The vote was unanimous. A quarter of the residents of Isle of Wight County are African-American. How proud they must be, how much confidence they must have in the county's leadership, to know that their supervisors unanimously chose as their leader a man who thinks it is funny to equate First Lady Michelle Obama –who holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard – with topless, spear-toting African tribal women.

Virginian-Pilot: The closeness of the Sixth District Senate special election serves as the second reminder in two months of how crucial every vote is.

Roanoke Times: Each outgoing governor is judged on whether he leaves the commonwealth better off than it was when he took office. The tragic truth is that the Virginian most miserably worse off than he was four years ago is Gov. Bob McDonnell. He exits public office on Saturday but cannot escape a federal investigation that has dogged him for months over $165,000 in loans and gifts he and his family accepted from a businessman involved in a tax dispute with the state. McDonnell's descent into disgrace was not the result of a single slip, but a series of shocking misjudgments capped off with an offensive "apology" issued via Twitter by his public relations consultant.