State and Local Stories
State economic-development officials raised ethical flags before Virginia’s secretary of commerce watched a Washington Redskins playoff game from the team’s luxury box, according to newly released emails that also show that his last-minute effort to fill the suite with business prospects fell flat. Only two business leaders and their spouses accepted Commerce Secretary Maurice Jones’s invitation to join him in the Redskins suite for the Jan. 10 game. Taxpayers were left with a $2,435.21 catering tab for the outing, which included a total of 15 state employees or their guests, all but six of them there strictly for fun. Those details emerged last week in emails and other documents released to The Washington Post under a Freedom of Information request.
Washington Post
A protracted nine-month controversy over a library exhibit may have finally ended, resulting in a new Jefferson-Madison Regional Library policy that creates a public forum display. It was a pro-abortion rights display sponsored by the Charlottesville chapter of the National Organization for Women near the front doors of the library system’s Central Library that spawned a slew of complaints and challenges to the organization’s public display case policy last year. Ironically, the objections to the display — labeled by some as politically charged and inappropriate for children — made way for a more open policy that recently was approved by the system’s board of trustees. Per the new policy, the content of the displays will be “unfettered” as long as it does not include defamatory or obscene materials that are not protected under federal guidelines. Material that could “lead to a breach of peace” or that advocates criminal activity also is prohibited.
Daily Progress
National Stories
It was a sea of green outside of the Carbondale (Illinois) Civic Center Saturday. Green shirts, green hoodies and green signs were out in full force to support the Justice for Molly movement as State Rep. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro announced the introduction of legislation — “dubbed "Molly's Law" She was accompanied by House Republican Leader Jim Durkin. The legislation is named for Molly Young, a Carbondale woman who died in 2012 from a gunshot wound to the head in the apartment of her former boyfriend, Richie Minton, who was a Carbondale police dispatcher at the time. Since Young's death, questions have persisted about whether she committed suicide, as an initial autopsy stated, or was murdered, as Young's father, Larry Young, has maintained. Bryant said the law will bring repercussions to municipalities and organizations who fail to comply with the Freedom of Information Act, such as increasing the fines for not releasing information that has been requested through the Freedom of Information Act to $10,000 plus $1,000 for each day information is withheld. Larry Young has sought documents related to the investigation of his daughter's death from Illinois State Police and Carbondale Police Department through FOIA requests. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan issued a binding opinion this past week instructing state police to turn over crime-scene photographs, ruling that ISP's denial to release the photos violated the Freedom of Information Act.
The Southern Illinoisan
District 1 Texas Rep. Gary VanDeaver's decision to send public records requests to (Arkansas) schools to gather staff addresses for mailing campaign material is being hailed as a smart political tactic by some and criticized by others as an overuse of political power and position. Mike Welch, a vocational teacher at Hooks Independent School District, said he found out his information had been sought by the VanDeaver campaign after his wife's friend saw a post on George Lavendar's Facebook page about midnight Wednesday that shared the Feb. 1 request letter in full. Lavendar is challenging VanDeaver for the Texas House spot in the Republican primary election in March. "I was just uncomfortable thinking the school would actually release that kind of information," Welch said. "My first thought was if I wanted someone to have my personal email address, I would give it to them. I also wondered, 'Why would the school even be obligated to respond to that request?'" Marshall Wood, a local attorney with experience in open records requests, said there is no question that making Freedom of Infor-mation requests to school district is legal, because like all governmental entities, school districts are subject to this law. However, one thing causing Wood pause is that the request is signed by VanDeaver in his offical capacity as state representative. Wood said this could make lay people think the request comes with all the power of VanDeaver's state office. "This smells bad," Wood said. "The whole lot smells bad. I don't care if it is legal or not."
Texarkana Gazettte
Editorials/Columns
State officials should welcome more access, not less. Transparency helps prevent corruption, weed out cronyism and discourage improper spending. Instead, state Sen. John Cosgrove wants to go the other way. His bill, SB552, excludes the names of police officers, fire marshals and other law enforcement officials from mandatory disclosure, making them a personnel record. The Chesapeake lawmaker’s bill passed the Senate and is in the House. Advocates for police accountability and open records say, if the legislation were to become law, it would be the first of its kind in the country, according to The Pilot’s Gary Harki and Patrick Wilson. The bill is onerous, unnecessary and contemptuous of Virginia’s citizens.
Roger Chesley, Virginian-Pilot
The state Senate has passed legislation that would exempt basic officer information — names and training records — from FOIA. Supporters of the measure have offered a series of tissue-thin excuses. For instance, they claim they are worried about officers and their families becoming targets of violence. So how many times has a law-enforcement officer been attacked because his name was reported in the press? One expert who follows the issue can’t recall a single instance. In a phone interview not even state Sen. John Cosgrove, the sponsor of the legislation, could cite an example. Cosgrove said he didn’t have statistics about violence against officers handy. Well, we do. It has been in sharp decline. Whether you measure attacks on officers in raw numbers, or in relation to the total number of officers, or in relation to the size of the overall population, violence against police officers is now at the lowest level it has been in many decades. Not years. Decades. Yet as we note above, instances of officers being hired — either by their own agency or a different one — after being fired for misconduct are plentiful. And apparently a majority of Virginia’s state senators think that’s perfectly fine. Indeed, they see so little wrong with it that they think members of the public should not even be able to find out if an officer accused of wrongdoing in one case has a record of wrongdoing in others. In their view, law-enforcement agencies should be able to bury that information forever. This isn’t about being pro-cop or anti-cop. Everyone recognizes that bad officers are the exception, not the rule. Holding departments publicly accountable is key to keeping it that way. Law-enforcement personnel are public employees, paid for with tax dollars and trusted with the power to arrest and even to kill. At a bare minimum, the public should be able to find out who they are.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
We can think of plenty of other instances involving nepotism, falsification of records, doctored disability claims and other scams that have beset law enforcement organizations from time to time, which agencies and police unions, duly embarrassed, would have loved to cover up. Thanks to open-records laws, keeping such abuse secret has been difficult. Virginia would be ill-advised to make it easier by enacting Mr. Cosgrove’s legislation.
Washington Post
The lead poisoning of the entire city of Flint, Michigan was preventable and should never have happened. Numerous pundits and industry experts have said this. Most of them, however, explain that if government had functioned properly, the environmental agencies would have properly communicated to their higher-ups and the problem would have been spotted much sooner. Those with a more cynical view intone that the government in Ann Arbor was not terribly interested in the plight of the largely poor residents of long-beleaguered Flint, a casualty of the Rust Belt Collapse. I think these experts have it wrong. Open data can help us, the people of the United States, prevent the next Flint. More specifically, real-time, machine-readable, regularly reported open data that is transparent from collection all the way through analysis. We cannot and should not rely on the government to always keep us safe. This is not an indictment. Governments are fallible, just as any other large organization is fallible. But 100 years ago, there was no way to easily access, analyze and monitor government activities. Today, there is no excuse not to do so.
Alex Salkever, Tech Crunch