Transparency News 2/5/15
Thursday, February 5, 2015
State and Local Stories
NOTE: According to the petitioner, Janice Denton, a Hopewell general district judge dismissed Denton’s suit yesterday that challenged the Hopewell City Council’s closed meeting to select a mayor and vice mayor. Though the judge said he sympathized as a citizen, he felt the law supported the city’s action. Denton may take her case to a circuit court.
The lawyers for the family of John Geer, killed by a Fairfax County police officer in August 2013, are now seeking all of the internal affairs files of the officer responsible, Adam D. Torres, according to motions unsealed Tuesday in Fairfax County Circuit Court. The court filings set the stage for the first public discussion of, and ruling on, the issue that apparently stymied the Fairfax prosecutor in early 2014 as he considered whether to charge the officer. The county prosecutor transferred the case to the Justice Department, where it remains more than a year later.
Washington Post
An overhaul of Virginia's ethics laws governing public officials is advancing in the General Assembly with some reluctance from a top lawmaker. Leaders in both chambers promised to make ethics reform a top priority last year after the conviction of Republican former Gov. Bob McDonnell on federal corruption charges. But Republican Sen. Majority Leader Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr. said Wednesday that the McDonnell conviction had a minimal impact on the push for ethics reform this session, which he said was instead being driven by the news media. "You know why we are doing this?" Norment said at a Senate panel hearing on an omnibus ethics bill he is sponsoring. "Because the media is on our backs."
Daily Press
A House of Delegates subcommittee on Wednesday advanced comprehensive legislation aimed at strengthening Virginia’s ethics laws. The proposal would reduce the current $250 cap on gifts to public officials to $100 and remove the distinction between tangible gifts and intangible gifts such as travel, meals and entertainment. “If there is any notion that there is any teeth lacking in the law, then we’re trying to take care of that and it certainly is our intention that people are held accountable for willful and intentional violations,” Gilbert said. House Minority Leader David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, also was pleased with the measure, which he said is improving.
Times-Dispatch
Richmond School Board member Mamie Taylor offered this week to trade a vote in favor of continuing a policy she has used to collect $4.15 in reimbursements for her travel to board meetings in exchange for a promise to withdraw a disciplinary complaint against another School Board member. Taylor, who represents the 5th District, also promised to get an outside group, the Richmond Coalition for Quality Education, to stop criticizing fellow member Kimberly Gray. The offer to Gray, who represents the 2nd District, came near the end of the board’s Monday meeting. It occurred during a closed session that had been called to discuss personnel issues. Gray has been among the biggest proponents of ending the travel reimbursement policy. Gray did not respond to the offer, according to several people who were in the room, and Chairman Donald Coleman, of the 7th District, attempted to end the conversation because the topic wasn’t eligible for discussion during a closed session of the School Board. The only member who would speak on the record, Derik Jones, of the 8th District, said he was taken aback that someone would ask about a discussion that occurred in closed session. He later sent an email to the board members chiding them for talking to a reporter about the closed meeting.
Times-Dispatch
The Norfolk School Board discussed a charter school proposal at its meeting Wednesday, nearly a year after Superintendent Samuel King abandoned his. The new proposal would make the charter school the division's comprehensive career and technical education high school. It would be the first charter for Norfolk and the second in the region. The board heard about the proposal within the last couple of days when Bishop met with two members at a time for an in-depth briefing, Chairman Kirk Houston said. But the written proposal given to members was not provided in the board's online repository and was not listed on Wednesday's original agenda. Before the meeting, the Pilot asked the board clerk, Houston and Vice Chairwoman Courtney Doyle via email whether the agenda was complete. The Pilot also requested a copy of the proposal once it was discussed Wednesday. Bishop said he didn't have more copies. Houston said he didn't have it with him but would direct a school spokeswoman to send it out. As of press time, The Pilot had not received a copy. Megan Rhyne, executive director for the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said the two-person meetings don't violate the state's Freedom of Information Act but that it's not a good practice.
Virginian-Pilot
Citizens will be able to watch Albemarle’s elected officials in action without attending a meeting now that the Board of Supervisors has unanimously voted to stream video of their proceedings over the Internet. The decision to invest in equipment for the service overturned a previous vote against the initiative in December. “I have become more appreciative of the idea,” said Supervisor Ann H. Mallek, one of three supervisors who originally voted against the idea. The county plans to hire the firm Granicus to provide the video-streaming service which will include the ability to watch archives of previous meetings. The new service, officials said, will not eliminate the need for detailed minutes.
Charlottesville Tomorrow
The city of Martinsville is considering buying an electronic system that would track the movements of city-owned vehicles and show whether they are being driven safely and efficiently. Data from automatic vehicle location (AVL) equipment installed in vehicles would reveal, for instance, whether a car or truck is being driven outside the city without permission or if a driver is speeding or letting a vehicle idle too long, according to a request for proposals that the city issued to vendors. Drivers could be reprimanded for not using vehicles properly, but that would not be the intent of installing the system, said City Manager Leon Towarnicki. Rather, he said the goal would be to find ways to save money by making city vehicle fleet operations more efficient.
Martinsville Bulletin
Maurice Jones, Virginia’s secretary of Commerce and Trade, violated federal anti-lobbying law while at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday concluded. Several months before he was appointed to serve under Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, then-HUD Deputy Secretary Jones sent an email to more than 1,000 “friends and colleagues,” urging them to contact their senators in support of the Senate version of a 2014 appropriations bill for HUD and other federal departments, the GAO said. HUD’s inspector general cleared Jones before a congressional committee last February, saying Jones only “inadvertently” skirted federal lobbying rules with his July 31, 2013 email. But the GAO investigated, and found Jones definitely violated a “bright-line rule” prohibiting federal agencies from indirect or grassroots lobbying over specific bills before Congress.
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
The room was still as 15 state senators offered an “aye” or a “no” one by one, indicating whether they wished to expand a proposal for how long police can keep automatic license plate reader-collected data from seven days to 60 days. As in many committee meetings related to police authority, the voices of law enforcement were clear and well represented. In a state Legislature dominated by Republicans, the clash between the liberties those lawmakers claim to hold dear, and their loyalty to police and public safety is all too real. Following the vote, Peterson released a statement noting the “formidable opposition” of law enforcement, “who are usually my very good friends and allies on legal issues. “Suffice to say there is a fundamental philosophical disagreement between our views of government data collection. My premise is pretty simple: the state should not use surveillance technology to collect information on its citizens when there is no discrete reason to do so.”
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
Virginia Delegate Randy Minchew fired off a pointed email last fall to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, pressing officials to explain their “grave concerns” about a proposed housing development not far from Washington Dulles International Airport. What he didn’t mention in the email, sent from his official state account and signed “J. Randall Minchew, Delegate, 10th House District,” is that he is also a partner at a law firm that represents the housing development, Evermont Trace, that had the airports authority concerned in the first place. The email, obtained by The Washington Times through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that Mr. Minchew questioned the airport authority’s concerns that residents might get fed up with noise and eventually lobby to curtail flights out of Dulles. ort officials in the email that they failed to account for the “advent of quieter aircraft.” An ethics watchdog said the email raises questions about whether Mr. Minchew was using his elected position to further the interests of a client of his firm.
Washington Times
If you want to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA gathered for a DHS “summit” on a danger that had been consuming them privately for years: the potential use of hobbyist drones as weapons of terror or assassination. The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week. Attendee Daniel Herbert snapped a photo and posted it to his website along with detailed notes from the conference. The day after the White House incident, he says, DHS phoned him and politely asked him to remove the entire post. He complied. “I’m not going to be the one to challenge Homeland Security and cause more contention,” says Herbert, who runs a small drone shop in Delaware called Skygear Solutions.
Wired
National Stories
There’s a growing gap between what government bondholders know and what they need to know. In the past three years, governments have collectively filed about 88 documents disclosing a direct borrowing deal with a bank to the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), the entity that presides over the $3.7 trillion municipal market. But that’s far from the actual number of direct deals governments have conducted with banks. A recent Moody’s Investors Service analysis of annual audits found more than 100 bank loans and other private financings in 2013 alone that were large enough to be considered material relative to the issuer’s resources and therefore of interest to investors. This discrepancy isn’t illegal -- governments aren’t required to immediately disclose their financings with banks like they have to do when they get financing through selling bonds. But in the past few years, more and more governments are finding that it's sometimes simpler and cheaper to borrow directly from banks instead of paying the fees associated with the process of selling bonds in the municipal market. And that lag time in reporting is not sitting well with the MSRB, which is stepping up its calls for better transparency.
Governing
A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism. Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify. White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public.
New York Times
State and Local Stories
NOTE: According to the petitioner, Janice Denton, a Hopewell general district judge dismissed Denton’s suit yesterday that challenged the Hopewell City Council’s closed meeting to select a mayor and vice mayor. Though the judge said he sympathized as a citizen, he felt the law supported the city’s action. Denton may take her case to a circuit court.
The lawyers for the family of John Geer, killed by a Fairfax County police officer in August 2013, are now seeking all of the internal affairs files of the officer responsible, Adam D. Torres, according to motions unsealed Tuesday in Fairfax County Circuit Court. The court filings set the stage for the first public discussion of, and ruling on, the issue that apparently stymied the Fairfax prosecutor in early 2014 as he considered whether to charge the officer. The county prosecutor transferred the case to the Justice Department, where it remains more than a year later.
Washington Post
An overhaul of Virginia's ethics laws governing public officials is advancing in the General Assembly with some reluctance from a top lawmaker. Leaders in both chambers promised to make ethics reform a top priority last year after the conviction of Republican former Gov. Bob McDonnell on federal corruption charges. But Republican Sen. Majority Leader Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr. said Wednesday that the McDonnell conviction had a minimal impact on the push for ethics reform this session, which he said was instead being driven by the news media. "You know why we are doing this?" Norment said at a Senate panel hearing on an omnibus ethics bill he is sponsoring. "Because the media is on our backs."
Daily Press
A House of Delegates subcommittee on Wednesday advanced comprehensive legislation aimed at strengthening Virginia’s ethics laws. The proposal would reduce the current $250 cap on gifts to public officials to $100 and remove the distinction between tangible gifts and intangible gifts such as travel, meals and entertainment. “If there is any notion that there is any teeth lacking in the law, then we’re trying to take care of that and it certainly is our intention that people are held accountable for willful and intentional violations,” Gilbert said. House Minority Leader David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, also was pleased with the measure, which he said is improving.
Times-Dispatch
Richmond School Board member Mamie Taylor offered this week to trade a vote in favor of continuing a policy she has used to collect $4.15 in reimbursements for her travel to board meetings in exchange for a promise to withdraw a disciplinary complaint against another School Board member. Taylor, who represents the 5th District, also promised to get an outside group, the Richmond Coalition for Quality Education, to stop criticizing fellow member Kimberly Gray. The offer to Gray, who represents the 2nd District, came near the end of the board’s Monday meeting. It occurred during a closed session that had been called to discuss personnel issues. Gray has been among the biggest proponents of ending the travel reimbursement policy. Gray did not respond to the offer, according to several people who were in the room, and Chairman Donald Coleman, of the 7th District, attempted to end the conversation because the topic wasn’t eligible for discussion during a closed session of the School Board. The only member who would speak on the record, Derik Jones, of the 8th District, said he was taken aback that someone would ask about a discussion that occurred in closed session. He later sent an email to the board members chiding them for talking to a reporter about the closed meeting.
Times-Dispatch
The Norfolk School Board discussed a charter school proposal at its meeting Wednesday, nearly a year after Superintendent Samuel King abandoned his. The new proposal would make the charter school the division's comprehensive career and technical education high school. It would be the first charter for Norfolk and the second in the region. The board heard about the proposal within the last couple of days when Bishop met with two members at a time for an in-depth briefing, Chairman Kirk Houston said. But the written proposal given to members was not provided in the board's online repository and was not listed on Wednesday's original agenda. Before the meeting, the Pilot asked the board clerk, Houston and Vice Chairwoman Courtney Doyle via email whether the agenda was complete. The Pilot also requested a copy of the proposal once it was discussed Wednesday. Bishop said he didn't have more copies. Houston said he didn't have it with him but would direct a school spokeswoman to send it out. As of press time, The Pilot had not received a copy. Megan Rhyne, executive director for the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said the two-person meetings don't violate the state's Freedom of Information Act but that it's not a good practice.
Virginian-Pilot
Citizens will be able to watch Albemarle’s elected officials in action without attending a meeting now that the Board of Supervisors has unanimously voted to stream video of their proceedings over the Internet. The decision to invest in equipment for the service overturned a previous vote against the initiative in December. “I have become more appreciative of the idea,” said Supervisor Ann H. Mallek, one of three supervisors who originally voted against the idea. The county plans to hire the firm Granicus to provide the video-streaming service which will include the ability to watch archives of previous meetings. The new service, officials said, will not eliminate the need for detailed minutes.
Charlottesville Tomorrow
The city of Martinsville is considering buying an electronic system that would track the movements of city-owned vehicles and show whether they are being driven safely and efficiently. Data from automatic vehicle location (AVL) equipment installed in vehicles would reveal, for instance, whether a car or truck is being driven outside the city without permission or if a driver is speeding or letting a vehicle idle too long, according to a request for proposals that the city issued to vendors. Drivers could be reprimanded for not using vehicles properly, but that would not be the intent of installing the system, said City Manager Leon Towarnicki. Rather, he said the goal would be to find ways to save money by making city vehicle fleet operations more efficient.
Martinsville Bulletin
Maurice Jones, Virginia’s secretary of Commerce and Trade, violated federal anti-lobbying law while at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday concluded. Several months before he was appointed to serve under Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, then-HUD Deputy Secretary Jones sent an email to more than 1,000 “friends and colleagues,” urging them to contact their senators in support of the Senate version of a 2014 appropriations bill for HUD and other federal departments, the GAO said. HUD’s inspector general cleared Jones before a congressional committee last February, saying Jones only “inadvertently” skirted federal lobbying rules with his July 31, 2013 email. But the GAO investigated, and found Jones definitely violated a “bright-line rule” prohibiting federal agencies from indirect or grassroots lobbying over specific bills before Congress.
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
The room was still as 15 state senators offered an “aye” or a “no” one by one, indicating whether they wished to expand a proposal for how long police can keep automatic license plate reader-collected data from seven days to 60 days. As in many committee meetings related to police authority, the voices of law enforcement were clear and well represented. In a state Legislature dominated by Republicans, the clash between the liberties those lawmakers claim to hold dear, and their loyalty to police and public safety is all too real. Following the vote, Peterson released a statement noting the “formidable opposition” of law enforcement, “who are usually my very good friends and allies on legal issues. “Suffice to say there is a fundamental philosophical disagreement between our views of government data collection. My premise is pretty simple: the state should not use surveillance technology to collect information on its citizens when there is no discrete reason to do so.”
Watchdog.org Virginia Bureau
Virginia Delegate Randy Minchew fired off a pointed email last fall to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, pressing officials to explain their “grave concerns” about a proposed housing development not far from Washington Dulles International Airport. What he didn’t mention in the email, sent from his official state account and signed “J. Randall Minchew, Delegate, 10th House District,” is that he is also a partner at a law firm that represents the housing development, Evermont Trace, that had the airports authority concerned in the first place. The email, obtained by The Washington Times through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that Mr. Minchew questioned the airport authority’s concerns that residents might get fed up with noise and eventually lobby to curtail flights out of Dulles. ort officials in the email that they failed to account for the “advent of quieter aircraft.” An ethics watchdog said the email raises questions about whether Mr. Minchew was using his elected position to further the interests of a client of his firm.
Washington Times
If you want to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA gathered for a DHS “summit” on a danger that had been consuming them privately for years: the potential use of hobbyist drones as weapons of terror or assassination. The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week. Attendee Daniel Herbert snapped a photo and posted it to his website along with detailed notes from the conference. The day after the White House incident, he says, DHS phoned him and politely asked him to remove the entire post. He complied. “I’m not going to be the one to challenge Homeland Security and cause more contention,” says Herbert, who runs a small drone shop in Delaware called Skygear Solutions.
Wired
National Stories
There’s a growing gap between what government bondholders know and what they need to know. In the past three years, governments have collectively filed about 88 documents disclosing a direct borrowing deal with a bank to the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), the entity that presides over the $3.7 trillion municipal market. But that’s far from the actual number of direct deals governments have conducted with banks. A recent Moody’s Investors Service analysis of annual audits found more than 100 bank loans and other private financings in 2013 alone that were large enough to be considered material relative to the issuer’s resources and therefore of interest to investors. This discrepancy isn’t illegal -- governments aren’t required to immediately disclose their financings with banks like they have to do when they get financing through selling bonds. But in the past few years, more and more governments are finding that it's sometimes simpler and cheaper to borrow directly from banks instead of paying the fees associated with the process of selling bonds in the municipal market. And that lag time in reporting is not sitting well with the MSRB, which is stepping up its calls for better transparency.
Governing
A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism. Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify. White House officials say the administration has undertaken a review on whether to release the pages but has no timetable for when they might be made public.
New York Times
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