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The Beaufort (South Carolina) Regional Chamber of Commerce is spinning off its tourism promotion duties into a new group, a move that could become widespread among South Carolina business organizations, depending on how the state Supreme Court weighs in on a long-awaited case. In metropolitan areas like Columbia and Charleston, chambers of commerce are separate from conventions and visitors bureaus, which solely exist to encourage tourism. But in Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach, those two groups are blended together, effectively mixing a publicly funded program with privately funded advocacy that seeks to shape policy. That arrangement has led to questions over whether mixed groups, which can receive millions in public money annually, should be subject to regulations like the state's Freedom of Information Act. That question is undecided, as the S.C. Supreme Court is still mulling whether nonprofits should be subject to disclosure laws.
Post and Courier
A conservation organization is suing a federal agency, alleging violation of the Freedom of Information Act. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a complaint March 21 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia Elkins Division against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, alleging failure to comply with the FOIA. The plaintiff alleges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service failed to make records available in response to the center's requests for information relating to the Berwind Mine in McDowell County and to Endangered Species Act consultations.
West Virginia Record
All but one state – Massachusetts – has a trade secret exemption to public records laws, which is widely used by companies with public contracts to block disclosure of all types of data and corporate details. The practice was highlighted in Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting’s “State Secrets,” a five-part series on state and local government secrecy. Government agencies often rely on the contractor to decide what is or is not a trade secret and whether disclosure would harm the company. While Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mary H. Strobel did not invalidate California’s trade secret exemption, she found that a Canadian bus manufacturer has provided the transit agency some documents with wage details and had not marked them confidential. That led the judge to conclude that the company had not done enough to keep the job and wage information secret, effectively waiving the trade secret exemption to disclosure. Strobel also ruled that the public’s interest in learning whether the company had fulfilled the terms of the deal overrode the company’s privacy concerns.
Reveal
A Killeen Daily Herald request for the Army to unredact pertinent information in the June 2, 2016, training accident that claimed the lives of eight soldiers and a U.S. Military Academy at West Point cadet in flood-swollen Owl Creek on Fort Hood could take until April 2019 to process, the Army says. The initial request was made in June 2016 to give the public information on the circumstances surrounding the vehicle rollover in the flood-swollen creek on post. The Army’s report, released more than a year later, redacted nearly 14 pages under the label “rationale for conclusion of analysis.” All five findings and five sets of recommendations were also covered over. The Herald had requested the report under the Freedom of Information Act to let the public know what happened and how further deaths could be prevented.
Killeen Daily Herald
Earlier this month, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the Governor’s Office and the Department of Public Safety (DPS) violated the state’s Open Records Act by failing to provide timely access to records, the first ruling of its kind in the state. The decision comes in a public records lawsuit filed in December 2014 by journalist Ziva Branstetter and Tulsa World, represented by attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, after Governor Mary Fallin’s office and DPS refused to answer requests for public records related to the botched execution of Clayton Lockett. In an effort to shed light on what went wrong during Lockett’s execution, Branstetter, who at the time was an editor for Tulsa World, sought the transcripts of witness interviews conducted as part of the investigation into the execution, as well as emails between state officials about the incident.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
In a definitive win for open records advocates, the Kentucky attorney general's office has found Kentucky State Police violated the state public records law by denying Courier Journal requests for the agency's database of arrest and traffic citations. The agency offered several reasons why it thought the database was exempt from disclosure. In addition to claiming the records would expose private information, the agency claimed it lacked the technical ability to separate legitimately confidential information from public information without creating a new record, which is not required under the law. But the attorney general's office knocked down those arguments in a forceful April 17 decision, declaring that the agency has no valid legal reason to refuse Courier Journal a redacted copy of the database, which can easily be produced by the agency.
Courier Journal
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