Transparency News 3/25/14

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

State and Local Stories

Companies that are interested in bidding on the assets of The Free Lance-Star Publishing Co. probably won’t participate in an auction if Sandton Capital Partners is allowed to credit bid the full amount it is owed, an FLS financial adviser testified Monday. Suzanne Roski of Protiviti Inc.’s Richmond office gave that testimony during a hearing in front of U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin R. Huennekens. The judge heard evidence in the case Monday and will return to court Tuesday morning to hear arguments from attorneys and potentially issue a ruling on how much Sandton will be able to credit bid. Roski’s firm has been helping the FLS prepare financial valuations, cash-flow estimates and marketing materials for potential bidders.Roski said about 30 entities have signed non-disclosure agreements with the FLS indicating interest in bidding on at least some of the company’s assets — which include the newspaper,fredericksburg.com, freelancestar.com, WFLS, WVBX, WWUZ, WNTX, Print Innovators, several real estate properties in the city and additional digital products.
Free Lance-Star

An effort is afoot to clarify what constitutes appropriate behavior in the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library system. That could mean liberalizing snacking and cell phone policies, and clamping down on the dress code, Farrell said. The nine-member board of library trustees saw a draft version of the revised conduct policy for the first time Monday. Proposed changes include lifting a moratorium on cell phone use in undesignated areas, so long as the chatter is not disruptive, and allowing patrons to bring covered drinks and dry snacks. Hot food still would be off-limits, except in library meeting rooms. 
Daily Progress

City officials finally appear poised to welcome a Lowe’s Home Improvement warehouse to The Falls.At its meeting tonight, the City Council is scheduled to hold two closed sessions — excluding the public and news media — to discuss possible tenants for The Falls, the city’s planned commercial center taking shape near Interstate 81’s Exit 5. The first session, at 6 p.m., is to discuss “unannounced business prospects regarding The Falls.” Following that, the council is scheduled to convene its regular meeting at 7 p.m. and almost immediately hold a joint closed session with its Industrial Development Authority to again discuss “unannounced business prospects regarding The Falls.” The meeting agenda then includes a “review and authorization to execute a contract” for a prospective new business.
Herald Courier

National Stories

Conservative public interest lawyers sent letters Monday giving the District of Columbia, Iowa and Colorado 90 days to prove they are taking steps to delete from their registration lists dead voters and former residents, or else face a lawsuit. Judicial Watch said the District has more people registered to vote than the Census Bureau says would be eligible, based on age. Counties in Iowa and Colorado face the same situation — an indication, the conservative group said, that those jurisdictions need to clean up their rolls.
Washington Times

While the “best” municipality using open data is still yet to be known, a new census has identified 36 cities making progress opening their data. The census, officially named the U.S. Open Data Census, has scored 36 cities based on the type and quality of their open data efforts. San Francisco was listed with the highest score, and was followed by Sacramento, Calif., in second place and Salt Lake City in third. The project — a collaboration among the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and Code for America — reviewed cities based on 17 categories of data sets that included information on crime, transit operations, construction permits, emergency management, GIS zoning and more. (Virginia Beach is ranked 18th)
Governing

“It won’t take me long to alienate everyone in the room,” Jeffrey Toobin told an audience in New York Friday. “For better or worse, it has been clear there is no journalistic privilege under the First Amendment.” The New Yorker staff writer and CNN commentator was appearing on a panel as part of a conference called Sources and Secrets at the Times Center. A lot has already been written about the conference (links below), so I’m going to pull out a theme that appears again and again in my notes: How much protection do reporters really have with regard to sources, and how much, if any, protection would a federal shield law give them? New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”
Poynter

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a ruling that shut down Delaware's novel program to have judges hear private arbitration cases, which critics blasted as "secret courts". The U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled last year that having state judges decide arbitration cases in secret violated the U.S. Constitution. "We believe that our nation and Delaware have lost an important opportunity to provide cost-effective options to resolve business-to-business disputes to remain competitive with other countries around the world," said Andrew Pincus, a Mayer Brown attorney who was hired by the state.
Reuters

Yale graduate students were urged to respect the “confidentiality” of an upcoming lecture by controversial Ford/ Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, according to an email sent by an administrator and forwarded to Salon. “Dr. Kissinger’s visit to campus will not be publicized, so we appreciate your confidentiality with respect to this exciting opportunity,” states an all-bold paragraph sent by Larisa Satara, the associate director of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, to a private listserv for Yale history graduate students. 
Salon

According to The New York Times, the Obama administration is planning to reveal new legislative proposals this week that could curb some of the NSA's most controversial practices. Civil liberty activists, tech companies, and several lawmakers have been up in arms about the NSA's mass surveillance programs that were exposed by Edward Snowden's top-secret document leaks beginning last year. This leak uncovered the NSA's Section 215 and PRISM programs, which were geared toward collecting data on US residents via cellular records and metadata from Internet companies.
CNET News
 

Editorials/Columns

Over the years, Virginia’s community college system has taught valuable lessons to countless students. Now it may have to learn one itself. The state-run system is being sued by the aptly named Christian Parks, a student at Thomas Nelson who was ordered to stop evangelizing in a campus courtyard last year. He says the system’s policy on demonstrations is unconstitutional, and he seems to be right about that.
Times Dispatch