Transparency News, 3/17/2022

Thursday
March 17, 2022

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state & local news stories

Today: the second of three lunchtime drop-in sessions to ask, "WTF? What the FOIA." It's free, but you have to register, and you can drop in or leave at any time during any or all sessions.

This series of charts analyzes the fate of 2,250 bills introduced during the annual General Assembly session. How many passed? How many failed and where were they killed? With each chamber controlled by a different party, how did Republicans and Democrats fare in getting their measures passed?
Virginia Public Access Project

Gov. Glenn Youngkin topped a state record by raising more than $5 million for his inaugural fund, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. The Republican’s $5.1 million tally topped the $4.3 million then-Gov. Tim Kaine raised for his inauguration in 2006. Kaine, a Democrat, is now a U.S. senator. Youngkin was inaugurated Jan. 15 as Virginia’s 74th governor. The largest donation to Youngkin’s inaugural fund was $250,000 from The Breeden Company Inc., a real estate developer in Virginia Beach.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Virginia Parole Board operations have ground to a halt with nearly 400 pending parole cases stalled in the wake of last week’s decision by Senate Democrats to reject four of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointments to the board, leaving only chairman Chadwick Dotson. The board members had been on the job six weeks and were in the process of reshaping the agency. “It’s an unworkable position, and it’s absolutely unconscionable what they have done for purely political purposes,” Dotson, a retired judge and former Wise County commonwealth’s attorney, said this week in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I’ve spent about every moment since then trying to figure out what the fallout is going to be on our operations here.” In the six weeks the board had been together, Dotson said the members had begun to “reshape” the agency with a focus on maximum transparency. “In the past, the parole board kind of voted in secrecy [and] they didn’t get together as often as I feel like they should have to discuss cases and do the work of a board,” Dotson said. “So we instituted regular board meetings, the taking of minutes and parliamentary procedure. And I implemented a process to try and prevent some of the issues that I think involved the recent parole boards.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Prosecutors called witnesses Wednesday that they say show that Roanoke Councilman Robert Jeffrey Jr. embezzled money from a local nonprofit housing organization to remodel his mom’s house and eat at nice restaurants. Those claims opened his embezzlement trial in Roanoke Circuit Court, where prosecutors have charged Jeffrey with two counts of felony embezzlement for allegedly taking funds from the Northwest Neighborhood Environmental Organization. Proceedings before jurors are scheduled to continue Thursday. Jeffrey, in a separate trial Monday and Tuesday, was found guilty by a different jury of two counts of obtaining $15,000 in pandemic relief funds from the city of Roanoke for his real estate management and media companies. He will be sentenced on those convictions at a later date.
The Roanoke Times

A proposal to start each Mathews County School Board meeting with a prayer failed to muster enough support to be brought to a vote, as a motion to that effect made by school board member Bobby Dobson failed for lack of a second. During Tuesday’s monthly meeting in the Mathews High School media center, Dobson put forward something similar to what county supervisors currently do, inviting pastors from county churches on a rotating basis to open each meeting with a prayer. For residents who don’t practice their religion in the county, leaders from those congregations would be invited as well, so long as the speaker is an ordained person with a physical place of worship, Dobson proposed.
Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal

stories of national interest

U.S. National Archivist David Ferriero, who is retiring in April, said on Monday that he urged the White House not to appoint a white man to succeed him.  "That's advice I've given to the White House already: that you better not hire another white male ... We've had ten white males," Ferriero said during an annual Sunshine Week event when the moderator pointed out that there has never been a female national archivist.
Axios
 

editorials & columns

"The public’s business should be public. Maybe someday there will be some record you do care about."

Now, maybe you don’t care about the parole board or police records, but the point here is the same: The public’s business should be public. Maybe someday there will be some record you do care about. There’s another point about the Freedom of Information Act that’s often overlooked: This isn’t just a law for the press, it’s a law for the public. Any of you can invoke the Freedom of Information Act to get access to certain government records, if you’re inclined to take the time and pay whatever fees are required (which are sometimes quite onerous, by the way). It’s only considered a press freedom bill because it’s usually only journalists who are the ones monitoring local and state governments on a full-time basis – and that brings me to another aspect of Sunshine Week. To paraphrase Mr. Withers, there ain’t no sunshine if news organizations are gone. Fewer journalists means fewer people sitting through city council meetings and rezoning hearings and school board retreats – and telling readers what happened. Fewer people monitoring court cases. Fewer people reporting on high school games – or high school plays or high school science fairs or anything else. Newsrooms aren’t shrinking because people have lost interest in news; they’re shrinking because the old business model doesn’t work and most daily newspapers now are in the hands of large, out-of-state corporations that are often saddled with debt. You’re getting less local news because there’s less revenue – and with what revenue there is, bondholders and stockholders have to get paid first. That’s why you’re not getting the coverage you used to get of – well, fill in the blank. And there are a lot of blanks.
Dwayne Yancey, Cardinal News

In 2019, Katherine Levine Einstein and her co-authors at Boston University produced the first in-depth study of this dynamic, Neighborhood Defenders, providing a unique insight into how hyper-local democracy can produce warped land-use outcomes. Governing talked with her about the politics of delay, what kind of regulations hamper growth and when community meetings can still be an effective means of public feedback. Governing: What could be wrong with a neighborhood meeting? Isn’t this democracy in its purest form?  Katherine Levine Einstein: In this book, rather than look at things in their ideal form, we actually evaluated how they are working on the ground. We bring data to the question of whether neighborhood meetings are really providing community voice. One of the reasons that we think of them as this important cornerstone of American democracy is because they are supposedly providing us perspectives that are not widely heard, really amplifying the voices of neighborhood residents. What we're able to do in the book is to really bring home the idea that the people who are showing up are not actually representative of their broader communities and they are unrepresentative in really important ways. They're much more likely to be opposed to new housing, and they're demographically privileged on a number of dimensions.
Governing