Transparency News 4/2/15

Thursday, April 2, 2015

State and Local Stories


The Virginia Tobacco Commission will likely seek restitution of grant funds involved in the fraudulent billing case against one former BVU Authority executive, the commission’s chairman said. Last week, David Copeland, a former vice president of field operations at BVU, pleaded guilty in federal court to profiting from false invoices submitted to BVU by a South Carolina firm, for a project funded by grant money from the Tobacco Commission. Copeland is one of two former BVU executives to plead guilty in separate cases last week, but there is no indication that the other case involved commission funds. Fraudulent invoices in the Copeland case totaled at least $144,000 and resulted in Copeland receiving at least $40,000 in cash, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Abingdon. “I’m sure we’ll be expecting at least some restitution,” commission Chairman and state Delegate Terry Kilgore said.
Herald Courier

Virginia taxpayers may never know why the Virginia Retirement System needed $322,000 worth of outside legal aid last year for investments alone. Even as he touts attempts to strengthen state ethics legislation, Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have made all legal contracts the state makes with outside special counsel available online for the public, saying that would “needlessly impose harmful restrictions on the ability of the commonwealth to secure specialized legal services and prosecute its cases.”
VirginiaWatchdog.org

The Mecklenburg County School Board sparred over whether to adopt a comprehensive whistle blower policy during the March monthly meeting in Boydton Monday. Traditional whistle blower policies are designed to protect persons who expose misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization. At the February meeting, Chase City-area trustee Dale Sturdifen asked whether the division’s policy manual included a whistle blower policy. Finance Director Donna Garner answered that the finance rules governing student activity funds contain such a provision, but there is no comprehensive policy. Sturdifen then asked chairman Sandra Tanner to look into whether other schools in the region have such a policy.
Mecklenburg Sun

Man who tried to extort state senator gets two years / Christopher Burruss, who has spent much of his life incarcerated, tried to extort Tommy Norment over "inappropriate communication" between him and a female friend of Burruss.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
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West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has signed a bill expanding some access of public records, while eliminating public disclosure of who owns concealed carry permits. The Democrat approved the legislation Wednesday. The bill exempts names, addresses and details of who has concealed handgun permits from Freedom of Information Act requests. Meanwhile, it requires the secretary of the state to maintain a database of FOIA requests. It says records requests can carry a charge based on the cost of reproducing materials, not on man hours.
WDTV

The federal agency charged decades ago with policing excessive government secrecy has never taken a single action against a federal official. Transparency advocates fear the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) inability to carry out a prosecution points to problems in the underlying law and represents a lost opportunity by Congress to hold federal officials accountable for cover-ups. “There is a risk that there is a lot of arbitrary and capricious withholding, and DOJ [the Department of Justice] is just not doing its job in making sure these individuals are held to account,” said Dan Epstein, executive director of the right-leaning Cause of Action. “It appears that process isn’t happening, which provides incentives to employees to withhold documents.”
The Hill

Hillary Clinton used an iPad as well as a BlackBerry to email staff while she was secretary of state, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The news of Clinton’s iPad use comes despite her explanation earlier this month that she used only a personal email address on a server run from her Chappaqua, New York, residence so she would have to carry only one device. Four emails released by the State Department as part of a Freedom of Information Act request in 2013 by the AP show an occasional gray area in the emails that mixed personal and work life.
Politico

Dozens of state legislatures across the United States are considering legislation that would exempt footage from police body-worn cameras, or "bodycams," from disclosure under state open records laws, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has learned. Though the new technology is supposed to enhance transparency and accountability, the proposed measures may actually increase secrecy.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Editorials/Columns

In plea deals and probation violations, minorities typically receive harsher treatment from the Virginia criminal justice system than their white counterparts. At least that's what it looks like from the information we've been able to collect. Truthfully, we're not sure. That's because the full documentation that would enable a thorough analysis is not readily available for public review, for reasons we can't easily discern. It means that a possible bias in our courts cannot be properly examined. It means a potential sickness cannot be remedied. And that is deeply worrisome for the commonwealth. Adding insult to injury, when asked about our conclusions about disparity in probation violations, Kristin Wright, the Office of Executive Secretary’s legislative and public relations director, delivered this whopper in an emailed response: "Your statistical analysis does not appear to be comprehensive," she wrote. The office that stands in the doorway to block us from obtaining a court-maintained database questions our analysis because we don't have the information that she won't provide? How rich.
Daily Press

Writing in this paper in August when the focus was on the University of Virginia and a contrived plan to limit dissent, I suggested that leaders of public institutions need to follow fundamental democratic principles and not act as if they are running a private organization. Joined by colleagues from Virginia’s Senate and House of Delegates — on both sides of the aisle — we were clear: Don’t put a muzzle on those who may disagree. Embrace public comment as a core value and be as transparent as possible! In a meeting later that month with the rector of the university’s governing board, I said I would be watching closely for change. Yet as evidenced by last week’s decision to ram through a tuition increase with no public notice, the university’s administration and its board of visitors have once again demonstrated just how tone-deaf both are when it comes to priorities of Virginians. Students tell me that instead of including the student body, the university closed the building, called for more security, went into bunker mentality and tried to outlast students who merely wanted a chance to be heard.
Del. David Ramadan, Times-Dispatch