Transparency News 2/15/16

State and Local Stories

The House and Senate will convene early today: the House at 10 a.m. and the Senate at 9:30. You can watch the session from the comfort of your snow-bound home:
House feed
Senate feed

It’s a time-honored democratic tradition: Citizens can stand up at public meetings and give elected officials a piece of their mind for a few minutes, whatever the topic. But you wouldn’t know it if you watched Norfolk or Virginia Beach city council meetings on TV or online. Both cities cut their video feeds off before those unfettered public comment periods begin. Council members say they don’t want to give people a public forum to advance political or personal causes that might have nothing to do with city business. Other Hampton Roads cities don’t share that concern. In Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk, meetings are aired gavel to gavel. The full meeting videos are archived online, too, so anyone can see a man telling the Suffolk council during one meeting last year how the city had violated his 14th Amendment rights.
Virginian-Pilot

A bill that would strip the names of public employees from salary databases released by the government cleared the state Senate Friday. Senate Bill 202 passed 27-10. Under this bill, carried by state Sen. Richard Stuart, employee names could still be tied to a salary via individual Freedom of Information requests, but electronic databases couldn't include those names. The measure was requested by the state's Department of Human Resource Management, and it's meant to help prevent identity theft. Salaries in publicly available databases would be tied to job titles, without names, if this bill becomes law.
Daily Press

Sunday Q&A with Megan Rhyne, executive director of the VCOG. QUESTION: How would you assess the current attitude at the General Assembly in terms of transparency and open government? ANSWER: I started out the session with high hopes, given the speaker’s (Speaker of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford) moves to improve the meeting notification system and to discourage members from holding meetings at their desks on the House floor. There were many pro-access bills introduced, too, and the (Freedom Of Information Act) subcommittee on the House side was very receptive to them. But the mood outside that subcommittee hasn’t been as welcomingand as we approach the crossover.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

A trial is scheduled to begin in Newport News Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by the Daily Press seeking access to a statewide database of circuit court records. The lawsuit, filed in August by the newspaper and reporter Dave Ress, argues that the state Supreme Court's Office of the Executive Secretary, which maintains a database of records using information from Virginia's circuit court clerks, is required to release that database under the Freedom of Information Act. The OES is a public entity that provides access to online court records and is the administrative support for all of Virginia's courts and magistrate offices. The OES has argued that FOIA exempts the release of records that court clerks are required to keep. The office routinely released the database until 2014, when it refused Ress' request for access.
Daily Press

Three days after the Culpeper Town Council went into closed session (Feb. 9) to discuss a personnel matter regarding a town council appointee Town Treasurer/Finance Director Pon Yusuf, who has held the position since September 2013, suddenly resigned effective Feb. 12, according to a town news release. The town refused to release a copy of Yusuf’s resignation letter citing the Virginia Freedom of Information Act exemption regarding personnel matters, although the town has released resignation letters to the media in the past.  The town also refused to provide the date on the resignation letter without revealing its contents. “(The date) is part of the confidential personnel file,” according to a Saturday email from Brunner.
Culpeper Times

How easy is it for a citizen to obtain public documents from government agencies in the Tri-Cities? For the most part, citizens do have access to public records — but it comes at a cost. Reporters at The Progress-Index sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the school divisions, county/city administrations and law enforcement of the three counties and three cities that make up the Tri-Cities region. School divisions had no problem adhering to FOIA requests. Local governments also adhered, but two of the six localities charged reporters for the public information. Law enforcement requests saw more difficulties. Reporters initially asked for the “felony police reports for the last three months” and were often met with either confusion, shock, anger or a combination of all three. Of the six law enforcement agencies reporters submitted FOIAs to, only the Dinwiddie County Sheriff’s Office responded with arrest reports for the last three months. The reports, however, did not specify which crimes were felonies or misdemeanors. All the other five law enforcement agencies stated that going back three months to locate all felonies would require significant man hours for their respective agencies and told reporters they would be charged a fee, some even in excess of $500. Other agencies and public information officers said they did not have to honor the request. "We're not going to honor that, we don't even have to honor that," said Esther Hyatt, Petersburg Bureau of Police public information officer, on Jan. 20. Hyatt then hung up on the reporter when asked for further  information and clarification.
Progress-Index

National Stories
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Jim Harbaugh’s contract with the University of Michigan requires the school to provide him with private aircraft time “as reasonable and necessary for all recruiting purposes.” During a 12-day stretch in his first month on the job in 2015, Harbaugh and his staff’s jet travels amounted to more than $10,000 a day in value, university records show. The documents were provided Thursday in response to a public records request USA TODAY Sports filed in August.
USA TODAY

The private information of about 12,000 D.C. public school students was accidently uploaded to a publicly accessible website, the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education announced Thursday in an internal memo. The information, which was online for several hours Tuesday, has been taken down. Officials said someone in the office uploaded the data to a public D.C. Council account at Dropbox — the online service offers large amounts of digital storage space — ahead of a council oversight hearing on the education department. All 12,000 students, who attend public and charter schools in kindergarten through 12th grade, are part of the Individualized Education Program, which provides tailored education plans for students with special needs.
Washington Post


Editorials/Columns

The irony is almost palpable: Members of the powerful House of Delegates Rules Committee killed Del. Ben Cline’s bill that would have required recorded votes on all committee and subcommittee votes died on an unrecorded vote. And, thus, Virginia and the General Assembly took yet another step backward in the ongoing struggle for openness and transparency in America’s oldest legislative body.
News & Advance

Committees and subcommittees have the habit of killing legislation without putting themselves on the record with an outright vote of rejection. Instead, they “table” the legislation — a limbo status that could last indefinitely. What’s more, they do it by voice vote — which means there is no record of who supported the motion to table, or who might have opposed it. Therefore, there is no individual accountability to voters for these decisions. Del. Cline’s bill would have ended that practice. His bill was killed — on an unrecorded voice vote, of course.
Daily Progress

One of the most important ways to monitor any government is to "follow the money." That's why line-item budgets must be open. That's why payments settling legal disputes can't be kept in the dark. And that's why we need to see lists of employees and their salaries. Given that pay and benefits rank as the largest part of any agency's budget, proper oversight of taxpayer money requires looking at who makes what. Such scrutiny can help prevent nepotism, favoritism, the lining of a buddy's pockets, and the paying of higher salaries than warranted. But there are moves afoot to shut this crucial information down.
Daily Press

PROPOSALS TO REFORM Virginia’s crooked redistricting process met an ignoble if sadly predictable end this month. The ritualistic sacrifice this time was handled by a House subcommittee whose members spent a total of 35 minutes discussing the five bills before killing them by voice vote. A refusal to seriously consider, much less approve, these proposals does a tremendous disservice to citizens and ignores the mounting evidence that the commonwealth’s redistricting process no longer serves Virginia’s best interests.
Virginian-Pilot