Transparency News 3/20/15
Friday, March 20, 2015
State and Local Stories
One day last year, a reader whose mother died from complications from a series of strokes called with a question for Daily Press health care reporter Prue Salasky. The woman's daughter asked the question: Why did the local ER lack certain kinds of care and equipment? Shouldn't they all provide similar services? That led Salasky — a veteran reporter who's covered the health care beat since 2010 — on a quest to learn more about emergency rooms, the state's oversight of them, the role of localities' rescue services, and where area residents can find the best care. From the outset, Salasky's investigation faced challenges because of difficulties in obtaining health care provider information. For one thing, all three local hospital systems are private, nonprofit entities not subject to the state's open records law. Also, the Virginia Freedom of Information Act allows most records related to the state's fragmented Emergency Medical Services system to be withheld. That included access to the "Trauma Registry," which details poor outcomes.
Daily Press
The Virginia Press Association has honored the Daily Press Media Group newsroom with its prestigious First Amendment Award, which recognizes journalists and news organizations that seek to advance, defend or preserve the First Amendment. The award is given to journalists who challenge closed governments and courtrooms, who successfully seek access to information, and who oppose threats to freedom of the press.
Daily Press
Chesterfield County Schools cites safety concerns as the reason it doesn’t release copies of school floor plans, but those detailed drawings that identify every room in every building in the division were temporarily published online last week. In addition, the drawings for eight of the schools had been available to download since last May. The mistake came as part of a request dated March 10 for private companies to replace the school division’s custodians, a move school administrators expect will save at least $3.5 million and expand to more than two dozen schools next year. A similar request to replace custodians on a smaller scale last year included floor plans for the eight schools. The files were first noticed March 11 by county resident and longtime government watchdog Brenda Stewart, who has an often-adversarial relationship with school division leaders. Stewart, who has been tracking the custodians issue and often pores over contract documents, noticed the floor plans and worried about the advantage those plans could give anyone motivated to harm others.
Times-Dispatch
Pulaski residents could have a new option for wireless Internet soon, if the Pulaski Town Council decides to move forward with it at a future meeting. According to Town Manager Shawn Utt, the town received a request from NRV Unwired, a Christiansburg-based Internet provider serving the New River Valley, and are looking to expand to Pulaski as well. NRV Unwired has worked out an arrangement with the Pulaski Public Service Authority to put antennas on water tanks throughout the county. In the town, antennas would be placed on water tanks on Veteran’s Hill, along Route 11 and the Ridge Avenue tank.
Southwest Times
National Stories
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has launched three mobile apps to help journalists in the field with answers regarding the right to record, cover schools, or access information from police and courts. The apps, which were made possible by a grant from the Gannett Foundation, are being announced during Sunshine Week, the annual open government initiative co-sponsored by the Reporters Committee and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The new apps – which also provide tools to collect audio, still and video images, and text for stories – join the Reporters Committee FirstAid app, introduced in 2013, which provides on-the-spot access to open government laws and information, and iFOIA, launched in 2014, which allows journalists to file and track freedom of information requests online.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
A push for answers on how a New York City police officer avoided criminal charges in the videotaped chokehold death of Eric Garner has run aground after failing to clear the strict legal bar protecting grand jury secrecy. State Supreme Court Justice William Garnett ruled on Thursday that the grand jury record would remain under seal, rejecting arguments by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others that the public had a right to know why jurors refused to indict the officer in spite of the video. He wrote that the law required the plaintiffs to establish a "compelling and particularized need" to release the grand jury minutes.
News & Advance
State legislators are pushing to make it much harder to release police officer body camera videos, undermining their promise as a tool people can use to hold law enforcement accountable. Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public. Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes more widely used. Advocates for open government and civil rights are alarmed.
New York Times
Ads attacking U.S. military aid to Israel were posted on Muni buses in San Francisco this year without incident. But Seattle's public transit line rejected the ads after threats of violence, and on Wednesday a divided federal appeals court upheld its decision. The ads, sponsored by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign, read, "Israeli War Crimes. Your Tax Dollars at Work." Municipal transit lines in several cities, including San Francisco, have carried them. In San Francisco, Muni has also accepted competing ads from anti-Islamic activist Pam Geller. One of those ads displayed a photo of Adolf Hitler and a Palestinian leader with the slogan "Islamic Jew-Hatred: It's in the Quran." King County officials in Seattle initially agreed to accept the ad against Israeli aid in late 2010, but backed off after getting an avalanche of e-mails, some threatening disruptions or violence. The county's Metro transit system, which had previously carried ads critical of Israel and other political messages, changed its policy after the incident and barred all political and ideological advertising on buses.
Governing
More than 400,000 Ohioans adopted between 1964 and 1996 will be given access from Friday to their birth certificates with the names of their biological parents. The bi-partisan Senate Bill 23, passed by the state legislature in 2013, closed a loophole in Ohio law that allowed adoptees born after 1963 and before Sept. 18, 1996 access to birth records, but denied those records for those born in the 32 years in between. The law included a two-year rollout that gave parents a chance to opt out of disclosing their names. "A judge could open the records for 'good cause' like severe medical need but very rarely did," Betsie Norris, executive director Adoption Network Cleveland said.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
Recent actions approved by the Hanover County Board of Supervisors and Hanover County School Board are encouraging when it comes to providing access to their public meetings. As we observe Sunshine Week, which started Sunday and continues through Saturday, March 15-21, we join with newspapers across the country, as well as the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, in being ever-mindful of our role in making sure that those elected or appointed to serve are adhering to the laws about how they conduct meetings. Transparency is a word we often hear when it comes to the operations of government. We have a right to expect our officials to live by the definition of that word. When the supervisors agreed to live streaming of meetings, we said “Hooray!” The same holds true for the school board’s audio streaming plan for regular sessions. We are optimistic by these steps and hope that more citizens will become involved by tuning in by means of today’s technology. Please take advantage of what is becoming available to us.
Times-Dispatch
Newspapers were once the dominant force in dislodging documents and other records from reluctant federal government agencies, but a new crop of media players, advocacy groups and corporate interests now drive the release of information. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 was first envisioned as a tool for traditional media to seek documents, data and information they deemed important to public interest. It also was meant to allow ordinary Americans to seek information from the federal government about themselves. Nearly a half-century later, news organizations continue to paper federal agencies with written and electronic requests for records and other information under FOIA, a review of agency logs shows, though they are cash-strapped and less likely to press their claims in court. Meanwhile, over the past decade there’s been a surge of requests from bloggers, advocacy groups, corporate lawyers, researchers and even foreign nationals tapping the promise of open records.
Kevin G. Hall and Kevin Johnson, Times-Dispatch
State and Local Stories
One day last year, a reader whose mother died from complications from a series of strokes called with a question for Daily Press health care reporter Prue Salasky. The woman's daughter asked the question: Why did the local ER lack certain kinds of care and equipment? Shouldn't they all provide similar services? That led Salasky — a veteran reporter who's covered the health care beat since 2010 — on a quest to learn more about emergency rooms, the state's oversight of them, the role of localities' rescue services, and where area residents can find the best care. From the outset, Salasky's investigation faced challenges because of difficulties in obtaining health care provider information. For one thing, all three local hospital systems are private, nonprofit entities not subject to the state's open records law. Also, the Virginia Freedom of Information Act allows most records related to the state's fragmented Emergency Medical Services system to be withheld. That included access to the "Trauma Registry," which details poor outcomes.
Daily Press
The Virginia Press Association has honored the Daily Press Media Group newsroom with its prestigious First Amendment Award, which recognizes journalists and news organizations that seek to advance, defend or preserve the First Amendment. The award is given to journalists who challenge closed governments and courtrooms, who successfully seek access to information, and who oppose threats to freedom of the press.
Daily Press
Chesterfield County Schools cites safety concerns as the reason it doesn’t release copies of school floor plans, but those detailed drawings that identify every room in every building in the division were temporarily published online last week. In addition, the drawings for eight of the schools had been available to download since last May. The mistake came as part of a request dated March 10 for private companies to replace the school division’s custodians, a move school administrators expect will save at least $3.5 million and expand to more than two dozen schools next year. A similar request to replace custodians on a smaller scale last year included floor plans for the eight schools. The files were first noticed March 11 by county resident and longtime government watchdog Brenda Stewart, who has an often-adversarial relationship with school division leaders. Stewart, who has been tracking the custodians issue and often pores over contract documents, noticed the floor plans and worried about the advantage those plans could give anyone motivated to harm others.
Times-Dispatch
Pulaski residents could have a new option for wireless Internet soon, if the Pulaski Town Council decides to move forward with it at a future meeting. According to Town Manager Shawn Utt, the town received a request from NRV Unwired, a Christiansburg-based Internet provider serving the New River Valley, and are looking to expand to Pulaski as well. NRV Unwired has worked out an arrangement with the Pulaski Public Service Authority to put antennas on water tanks throughout the county. In the town, antennas would be placed on water tanks on Veteran’s Hill, along Route 11 and the Ridge Avenue tank.
Southwest Times
National Stories
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has launched three mobile apps to help journalists in the field with answers regarding the right to record, cover schools, or access information from police and courts. The apps, which were made possible by a grant from the Gannett Foundation, are being announced during Sunshine Week, the annual open government initiative co-sponsored by the Reporters Committee and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The new apps – which also provide tools to collect audio, still and video images, and text for stories – join the Reporters Committee FirstAid app, introduced in 2013, which provides on-the-spot access to open government laws and information, and iFOIA, launched in 2014, which allows journalists to file and track freedom of information requests online.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
A push for answers on how a New York City police officer avoided criminal charges in the videotaped chokehold death of Eric Garner has run aground after failing to clear the strict legal bar protecting grand jury secrecy. State Supreme Court Justice William Garnett ruled on Thursday that the grand jury record would remain under seal, rejecting arguments by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others that the public had a right to know why jurors refused to indict the officer in spite of the video. He wrote that the law required the plaintiffs to establish a "compelling and particularized need" to release the grand jury minutes.
News & Advance
State legislators are pushing to make it much harder to release police officer body camera videos, undermining their promise as a tool people can use to hold law enforcement accountable. Lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills to exempt video recordings of police encounters with citizens from state public records laws, or to limit what can be made public. Their stated motive: preserving the privacy of people being videotaped, and saving considerable time and money that would need to be spent on public information requests as the technology quickly becomes more widely used. Advocates for open government and civil rights are alarmed.
New York Times
Ads attacking U.S. military aid to Israel were posted on Muni buses in San Francisco this year without incident. But Seattle's public transit line rejected the ads after threats of violence, and on Wednesday a divided federal appeals court upheld its decision. The ads, sponsored by the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign, read, "Israeli War Crimes. Your Tax Dollars at Work." Municipal transit lines in several cities, including San Francisco, have carried them. In San Francisco, Muni has also accepted competing ads from anti-Islamic activist Pam Geller. One of those ads displayed a photo of Adolf Hitler and a Palestinian leader with the slogan "Islamic Jew-Hatred: It's in the Quran." King County officials in Seattle initially agreed to accept the ad against Israeli aid in late 2010, but backed off after getting an avalanche of e-mails, some threatening disruptions or violence. The county's Metro transit system, which had previously carried ads critical of Israel and other political messages, changed its policy after the incident and barred all political and ideological advertising on buses.
Governing
More than 400,000 Ohioans adopted between 1964 and 1996 will be given access from Friday to their birth certificates with the names of their biological parents. The bi-partisan Senate Bill 23, passed by the state legislature in 2013, closed a loophole in Ohio law that allowed adoptees born after 1963 and before Sept. 18, 1996 access to birth records, but denied those records for those born in the 32 years in between. The law included a two-year rollout that gave parents a chance to opt out of disclosing their names. "A judge could open the records for 'good cause' like severe medical need but very rarely did," Betsie Norris, executive director Adoption Network Cleveland said.
Reuters
Editorials/Columns
Recent actions approved by the Hanover County Board of Supervisors and Hanover County School Board are encouraging when it comes to providing access to their public meetings. As we observe Sunshine Week, which started Sunday and continues through Saturday, March 15-21, we join with newspapers across the country, as well as the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, in being ever-mindful of our role in making sure that those elected or appointed to serve are adhering to the laws about how they conduct meetings. Transparency is a word we often hear when it comes to the operations of government. We have a right to expect our officials to live by the definition of that word. When the supervisors agreed to live streaming of meetings, we said “Hooray!” The same holds true for the school board’s audio streaming plan for regular sessions. We are optimistic by these steps and hope that more citizens will become involved by tuning in by means of today’s technology. Please take advantage of what is becoming available to us.
Times-Dispatch
Newspapers were once the dominant force in dislodging documents and other records from reluctant federal government agencies, but a new crop of media players, advocacy groups and corporate interests now drive the release of information. The Freedom of Information Act of 1966 was first envisioned as a tool for traditional media to seek documents, data and information they deemed important to public interest. It also was meant to allow ordinary Americans to seek information from the federal government about themselves. Nearly a half-century later, news organizations continue to paper federal agencies with written and electronic requests for records and other information under FOIA, a review of agency logs shows, though they are cash-strapped and less likely to press their claims in court. Meanwhile, over the past decade there’s been a surge of requests from bloggers, advocacy groups, corporate lawyers, researchers and even foreign nationals tapping the promise of open records.
Kevin G. Hall and Kevin Johnson, Times-Dispatch
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