Transparency News 2/16/15
State and Local Stories
Loudoun's educators have filed a petition to hinder a court-mandated release of student test scores, saying the data violates the privacy of the county's teachers.In January, Lansdowne parent Brian Davison won a case against the Virginia Department of Education in the Richmond Circuit Court, forcing the department to release student growth percentile scores. The data is used to measure student improvement in math and English across grade-levels, which Davison hopes will be used to better assess student improvement and Loudoun teacher competency. But some, including the Loudoun School Board, say Davison's intended use of the scores unfairly targets Loudoun's teachers. Board members filed the petition Feb. 11 after a closed session meeting the day before. Other education groups, like the Loudoun Education Association and the Virginia Education Association, also signed the petition to intervene in the title case Davison versus the Virginia Department of Education. The move comes after Virginia Assistant Attorney General Wendell Roberts sent a letter to the Richmond Circuit Court requesting the suspension of the court's order to release the data. Davison had filed a Freedom of Information Act for the VDOE to release publicly Loudoun's student growth scores for the past five years.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
As proposed changes to the rules that govern Dominion Virginia Power raced through the General Assembly this month, the company’s ample political power was on full display. Through its political action committee, the company has donated $1.6 million to statewide and legislative candidates since the start of 2013, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. But political contributions aren’t the only way Dominion wins friends and allies. The Dominion Foundation gives away about $15 million per year — in donations ranging from $1,000 to $250,000 — to a huge array of charitable causes in the states where Dominion operates. Many of the biggest gifts are made in Richmond, where the company is headquartered. “No single company even comes close to Dominion in terms of its wide-ranging influence and impact on Virginia politics and government,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and political analyst. “It is the first corporate entity most people think about in the Old Dominion. The company doesn’t win all its battles, but they prevail in the lion’s share.”
Roanoke Times
Turmoil in the Halifax County administrative office is spilling into the courtroom as County Planner Robbie Love and Finance Director Stephanie Jackson have a hearing date set next Wednesday to consider Jackson’s request for a protective order against Love. Jackson already has taken out a preliminary order against Love alleging that he subjected her and her family “to an act of violence, force or threat,” as stated on the document form. She obtained the protective order on Feb. 4, five days after an alleged conversation involving Love and a mutual friend in which the county planner was said to have discussed owning a 9mm gun and “he was going to take everyone out. “He went on to say that Jim Halasz, myself, James Edmunds were going to pay for what they had done,” wrote Jackson in a statement accompanying her request for court-ordered protection. The conversation, said to be between Love and a Social Services department employee, was relayed to Jackson after the fact and provides the basis for the order issued by General District Judge S. Anderson Nelson. In her request, Jackson asked that Love be kept 1,000 feet away from her and her family. The copy of the judge’s ruling does not stipulate a distance.
News & Record
While Hampton Roads communities are brimming with federal employees — a byproduct of defense installations that blanket the region — federal law places a key restriction on their ability to participate in local government. Under provisions of the Hatch Act, passed in the 1930s, federal workers are barred from seeking elective office in partisan races where candidates are explicitly identified by party affiliation on the ballot. And James City County is the only locality on the Peninsula that does that. Heath Richardson, who describes himself as a "moderate Republican," recently ended his campaign for Board of Supervisors after learning from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel that his candidacy would likely violate the Hatch Act, which aims to prevent conflicts of interest for executive branch workers.
Virginia Gazette
A jumbled digital data file of Virginia’s incorporated entities could be the foundation for sustainable revenue improvement for local governments, according to the head of a Charlottesville-based nonprofit. Waldo Jaquith, founder of U.S. Open Data, recently spent most of the past year trying to decode digital data records for about 800,000 registered corporations that were created and maintained by the State Corporation Commission. He paid $150 a month for a three-month data subscription and began to dig in, creating www.vabusinesses.org along the way. The website is a free, user-friendly, searchable database of Virginia companies.Demand is low. Based on a Freedom of Information Act request, Jaquith said he’s one of seven customers to pay for the corporate entity data. The other customers, he said, are legal and business research companies such as LexisNexis. Jaquith said he hopes the next step is to push the SCC to simply give away the data, with the hope that other people will use it to build databases that provide further insight into more state- and locally based businesses and their potential economic impact. The SCC recently named Samuel Nixon its chief administrative officer. Jaquith said he’s hopeful that Nixon, who is slated to start next month, will improve and expand the use of business-related data. “Sam Nixon’s 30 years of experience in the field of information technology will be a great benefit to the commission as we embark on a major upgrade and modernization of our computer systems to better serve the public,” the SCC said in a recent announcement.
Daily Progress
National Stories
A judge in Washington state decided not to sentence a woman to jail or to levy a $500 fine for each day she refuses to release names of Saudi Arabian women who made negative comments on a Facebook page about a Saudi assemblywoman. Samia El-Moslimany, a women's activist and photographer who lives in Burien, Wash., and Saudi Arabia, had been ordered by courts in Massachusetts and King County to reveal the names of Saudi women who commented about Hayat Sindi, one of the first female assemblywomen in Saudi Arabia. Last year in court, El-Moslimany offered copies of all the comments on the Facebook page with the commenters' names redacted because she feared releasing the names could leave the women vulnerable to Saudi defamation charges punishable by jail time and lashing. Sindi, who established U.S. residency to be a visiting scholar at Harvard University, wanted the names for a civil investigation into who hacked her email and Skype accounts in mid-2013.McClatchy
In the race to equip police officers with body cameras, some cities are bypassing traditional purchasing rules to award vendors with controversial no-bid contracts. Hundreds of cameras and millions in public dollars have been committed in such deals involving Albuquerque, San Diego and Spokane. Los Angeles, meanwhile, has taken a different route: About $1.6 million in private funding, which is not subject to regular municipal controls, is financing the acquisition of about 800 cameras that could be on the streets in the next 90 days. Some city officials defended the so-called sole-source contracting process, arguing that the need to quickly address public safety problems and the unique capacity of Taser to assist those efforts outweighed the need to seek competitive bids.
USA Today
Editorials/Columns
Roanoke Times
Virginia lawmakers are coalescing in bipartisan fashion around a terrible idea. That's not necessarily new, but the consequence of the plan embodied in SB1393 effectively seals critical information about the government's use of lethal injection on behalf of Virginians. It's wrong, and the twisted rationale offered by defenders, including the bill's patron, Democratic Sen. Dick Saslaw, underscores its moral bankruptcy.
Virginian-Pilot
Fear, uncertainty and money are powerful motivators. And no one deploys them more effectively in the General Assembly than Dominion Virginia Power. The electric utility is Virginia's biggest power provider and biggest corporate campaign donor. The mere mention of legislation or regulations that could lead the utility to raise its rates, forcing consumers - voters - to pay more, is sufficient to jolt most Virginia lawmakers into action. These factors helped persuade lawmakers to quash a series of alternative energy-related bills opposed by Dominion this session. They also helped sway most lawmakers to approve a bill that ensures Dominion's consumers won't have to pay higher electricity rates through the next five years, and ensuring the monopoly won't need to worry for five years about being forced to refund consumers for profiting more than the State Corporation Commission permits.
Shawn Day, Virginian-Pilot
The Fraternal Order of Police has brought a legal challenge that threatens to limit the reach of Kalven v. Chicago, the 2014 Illinois Appellate Court decision holding that documents bearing on allegations of police abuse are public information. If the police union prevails, hundreds of thousands of police misconduct files currently available to the public will be destroyed.
Chicago Sun Times
If you have ever been forced to call a government agency to obtain information or a service, e.g., the DMV, you have some idea of how well the government works when the agency in question exists, at least ostensibly, to provide a service to the public. Now imagine that the agency doesn’t exist to service you, and that they are annoyed by your very existence and your audacity in asking them for records on how they do their jobs. While we and many other requesters have been successful in prying records out of agencies, in many instances this did not occur until a substantial amount of attorney time had been expended. Like all things involving this Administration, FOIA processing has become politicized. Early in the Obama Administration, Gregory Craig, then Counsel to the President, sent agencies a memo requiring them to flag requests with “White House equities” and to obtain White House clearance before releasing responsive records on such requests. Because of this, agencies have gone so far as to attempt to not disclose the names of White House staff that attended meetings with agency personnel.
Nathan Mehrens, Washington Examiner
Lawmakers ignored the key recommendation made by the Governor’s Commission on Integrity and Public Confidence in State Government: Create an independent ethics commission with the power to investigate and initiate complaints. That legislators ignored it may have surprised no one. But it’s a failing, especially given the protests in the Senate that further reforms are not really needed at all. Sen. John Watkins, one of the most outspoken on this point, is a well-respected legislator whose remarks deserve thoughtful consideration. He is retiring from the state Senate at the end of his term, and can hardly be accused of self-interest in lamenting an end to the free travel, Redskins tickets and other perks that lobbyists lavish on legislators. Earlier in the week, he said, “I think it is going to drive people out of the legislative process.” We expect he speaks for others in the Senate who voted for the ethics bill not because they think it is a good thing, but because they are up for re-election and are afraid a vote against it would hurt them, in the press and at the polls.
Roanoke Times
Last week the Virginia Senate passed a bill — Senate Bill 1393 — to hide from public view both the components of the drugs used to execute convicted capital criminals in the commonwealth and the identity of the companies that supply these drugs. We think it the essence of bad government to enshroud the state in secrecy when it exercises the awesome power to extinguish human life. One of us (Lain) contends that there are serious constitutional problems with this bill. The other (Walsh) is unconvinced. But we both agree that passage of this bill will provide capital convicts with a new set of legal claims that could halt the administration of the death penalty in Virginia for months, maybe years. And for what? The Department of Corrections says that the compounding pharmacies now mixing the lethal concoction for Virginia’s executions will not sell the drugs if their identities are known. These companies do not want to feel the same heat that led large, publicly traded pharmaceutical companies to extricate themselves from executions several years ago. But shielding Virginia’s newer, less-regulated drug suppliers from public criticism would be just wrong. The death penalty is controversial, but the right answer to controversy in a free society is not to hide what the government is doing, or to protect for-profit companies from bad publicity from their unsavory deals.
Roanoke Times
In the January issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows describes how the effectiveness of the U.S. military has become a taboo subject in the political arena. Given the vital importance of our military's performance, Fallows' article is important and disturbing. Fallows writes that, in contrast to the military, the subject of effectiveness is readily admissible when the objects of attention are schools or other domestic government services. My own experience, however, is that there are powerful built-in barriers that work against discussing the effectiveness of government institutions regardless of service area. Let me explain. The salient obstacle is what seems like a universal compulsion to consider effectiveness only through political lenses. When government's institutions do things we approve of, we credit politicians we like; when these institutions do things we disapprove of, we blame politicians we dislike. When we do manage to look beyond politicians themselves, we look to the policies they have put in place and the political appointees they have selected for government's top jobs. In short, we contemplate institutional shortcomings as if there were only two possible causes: the directions given by politicians and the actions taken (or not taken) by their appointees. So it is that we have unwittingly excused ourselves from examining the bureaucracies of government.
Richard Clay Wilson Jr., Governing
