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Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Note: The old format of the newsletter should return tomorrow, Wednesday. Thank you to those who contacted me about the difficulty in reading this format, which I had to use as a stop-gap measure while issues with our usual provider were ironed out. Thank you for your patience and support.
State and Local Stories
The Senate passed an ethics bill after a lengthy debate in which even supporters enumerated its flaws, saying it was either an unnecessary bill or an inadequate one. Senate Democratic Leader Richard L. Saslaw of Fairfax County spoke harshly of the bill, saying it would have done nothing to prevent unethical behavior in the past nor would it prevent future misdeeds. The lone dissenting vote in the Senate came from Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, who said the bill had been crafted in a “knee-jerk fashion” and should be studied further.
News Leader
Virginia legislators chastened by a gift scandal are poised to rewrite state ethics laws imposing new financial disclosure standards on themselves and lobbyists that critics, and some officials, say are more feel-good than culture-changing. Bills the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates advanced Monday overhaul state ethics policy in several ways: They place a $250 per-item limit on gifts from registered lobbyists, enhance reporting requirements, and create a new ethics oversight panel. What critics say they fail to do, as written, ismeaningfully restrict special interests' ability to pay for lawmakers to attend major sporting events, pick up restaurant tabs, or take them on golf outing and hunting trips.
Virginian-Pilot
The Virginia Senate added an extra sentence to its ethics bill during today's floor debate that would prohibit legislators from getting reimbursed for the cost of attending, for lack of a less o phrase, secret meetings. That fits a handful of things, but most notably ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council. This group suggests model legislation across the country. It's on the right of the political spectrum, and it caught a lot of heat a while back because one of its model bills was based on Florida's stand-your-ground law, which of course was at issue in Trayvon Martin's death. State Sen. Donald McEachin has been pushing a bill for a couple of years to keep legislators from using taxpayer money to attend ALEC conferences, or other meetings where the order of business is a secret.
Daily Press
Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Louisa County, ended his legislative efforts Monday to ban a campaign tactic used against fellow Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the governor’s race last fall. Garrett, whose district includes part of Lynchburg, proposed two bills that would prohibit government employees and elected officials from retaliating against people who express views they don’t like. Garrett said Democrats in the Senate threatened to kill the entire ethics bill if his bans were to become part of the measure. “I withdrew my amendments because I believe the effort to reform ethics in the Commonwealth is more important than subjecting it to partisan politics,” Garrett said.
News & Advance
Local police in Virginia will retain their ability to collect data from license plate reader cameras for at least another year, even though an attorney general’s opinion last year declared that doing so was illegal. On Monday, the second of two bills in the General Assembly to limit police collection of such data was tabled for the year, after both legislators agreed that their bills required more study and more specific wording. This means the debate weighing the importance of personal privacy vs. solving crimes and finding missing persons will continue for another year. The conversation is happening across the country as politicians try to decide how long data collected from license plate reader cameras — which can snap hundreds of license plate photos per minute, with time, date and location information — can be maintained.
Washington Post |