Transparency News 2/16/16

State and Local Stories

The Virginia Senate voted 25-15 on Monday to keep the names of all police officers and deputy sheriffs a secret. SB552 by Sen. John Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, applies to any local or state officer, including officers from agencies such as the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and the Virginia Marine Police. Cosgrove said during an earlier subcommittee hearing that he filed the bill in response to a November court ruling allowing The Virginian-Pilot access to names, agencies and employment dates for current Virginia police officers. The newspaper is examining how often officers who got in trouble were able to find other jobs in law enforcement. Cosgrove said Monday that his bill, which exempts law enforcement officers from Freedom of Information Act requirements, should be passed to protect officers and their families from being targeted for violence.
Virginian-Pilot

Ethics reforms the General Assembly passed the last two years would get a write-through under bills moving here, and the state Senate hopes free meals get put back on the menu for elected officials. The chamber passed its 39-page proposal, carried by Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. "Tommy" Norment, on Monday. The House passed about 10 smaller bills, proposing changes one or two at a time instead of rolling everything into one omnibus bill. The Senate's suggestions roll back more of the changes made the last two years than the House proposes. Perhaps the biggest change would be removing food and beverages from the law's definition of gifts.
Daily Press


National Stories
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Shortly after taking office, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made it clear he wanted street projects to be better coordinated and timed. “No more Bureau of Street Services paving a street on Monday, [Department of Water and Power] digging it up on Tuesday,” he said. Now the city has a tool to make sure that doesn't happen. City employees can go online and see whether the road they want to repave is already scheduled to be torn up soon for some other reason, like replacing a sewer pipe. If it is, they can hold off. Residents can also see the same information, so they know, for instance, how long their street will be under construction. The new tool is called Street Wize, and it's only the tip of the iceberg for what L.A. wants to accomplish by sharing its real-time information with the public. Street Wize pulls info from the city's new GeoHub site, which hosts 500 types of geographic data on medical clinics, historic earthquakes, zoning restrictions, oil wells and movie studios, to name just a few. Some of the biggest users of the online library are city agenciesthat couldn't previously access information from other departments. So while Street Wize was designed to help the street and water departments, it's also now being used by the fire department to help speed emergency response times, said Coral.
Governing

Editorials/Columns

The stock market's recent volatility is a continuation of the bumpy ride investors have experienced since the Great Recession. Such swings used to have little direct effect on public pension plans, but that has changed. That's because over the past four decades public pensions, in hopes of boosting investment returns, have shifted funds away from fixed-income investments such as government and high-quality corporate bonds. Today they hold, on average, about half of their assets in stocks and another quarter in alternative investments such as private equity, real estate and hedge funds. Between 2006 and 2013, the percentage of their funds invested in alternative assets more than doubled. Not surprisingly, the collective returns of public fund investments over the last few years have been volatile, ranging from a high of 21 percent in fiscal year 2011 to a low of 1 percent in fiscal 2013. Returns for calendar 2015 are expected to be essentially flat. Rules governing disclosure and transparency haven't kept pace with these trends. While some individual funds and states have made changes, more work must be done to increase transparency and present a clear picture of funds' bottom-line performance and costs.
Governing

Because Summerville (S.C.) police and municipal court officials refused to release public information, citizens were unaware that a man who had been charged with rape was on bail, walking freely among them for five days. They didn’t even know to be cautious. Thomas Michael Powell has been charged by police with attacking two women whom he had met online. People on bail are not supervised, and the court did not instruct Mr. Powell to stay away from the Internet. Citizens learned about the situation only after Mr. Powell was arrested subsequently by Berkeley County deputies on charges of kidnapping and criminal sexual assault in an earlier December incident. Perhaps both the police and court administrators don’t understand the Freedom of Information Act. Or perhaps they simply chose not to abide by it. Either way, such actions potentially put people at risk by keeping them in the dark. And apparently their tactics did nothing to assist in the investigation. Ignoring Freedom of Information laws is ill-advised — and illegal.
The Post and Courier