Transparency News 4/28/17

Friday, April 28, 2017

State and Local Stories

State auditors gave a two-hour closed-door briefing Thursday on what their review of the Peninsula Airport Commission has shown them so far, prompting the commission to call a special meeting next week to discuss possible action based on those preliminary findings. Commission interim director Sandy Wanner declined to discuss what that action might involve. The leader of the state audit team, Bradley W. Gales, director of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s assurance and compliance office, said Thursday that TowneBank has now provided financial records he had sought from the commission and that a second batch of several thousand city of Newport News emails he asked for should be delivered in the next couple of days. But auditors have had no luck yet getting the records that could show whether taxpayer funds used to pay off a $4.5 million debt incurred by the defunct People Express Airlines were used appropriately. The records they need belonged to People Express, and auditors are in contact with the airline’s lawyers to see if they can get them, Gales said.
Daily Press

Departing Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Dana Bedden copied text from other sources without proper attribution throughout his 2006 doctoral dissertation at Virginia Tech, a review by the Richmond Times-Dispatch found. To receive his doctorate in educational leadership and policy studies, Bedden submitted a 130-page academic paper that included large blocks of text taken almost word-for-word from court opinions and other academic publications without quotation marks or indentation. The School Board’s reluctance to explain the circumstances surrounding Bedden’s departure fueled speculation this week about what caused it. After receiving a tip, The Times-Dispatch used plagiarism-detection software to analyze Bedden’s dissertation and found more than a dozen examples of large blocks of text reproduced from other sources with lax attribution. An academic adviser who worked with Bedden on the dissertation called the lack of quotation marks and indentation an “innocent oversight,” but two ethics experts said it raises questions about the thoroughness of the work.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

National Stories
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When citizens turn on their faucet, visit a library or fly out of an airport, there’s a good chance they’re being served by a special district. These entities frequently spend hundreds of millions in public funds a year, but information about how those dollars are used is often scarce. A report published this week by U.S. PIRG, a public interest research group, is likely the first national review of online transparency practices for special districts. It found that most of them fail to meet basic transparency standards, and a slight majority of the special districts reviewed received failing grades.
Governing

The Connecticut General Assembly is trying to exert more control over CT-N TV coverage of state government proceedings under a new request for proposals for a new five-year contract, raising protests freedom-of-information advocates. The issue was Topic A at a midday meeting Wednesday of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information—a group that has been “working for open, accountable government and a free press since 1955,” according to its website. The existing contract with the current operator of the government-TV system, Connecticut Public Affairs Network (CPAN), says that “CPAN retains full editorial discretion regarding day-to-day programming.” However, the new RFP says that under a new five-year contract starting later this year, the operator of the system “shall only cover Executive branch meetings which are pre-approved by the CGA [Connecticut General Assembly]” and, where Judicial Branch events are concerned, “shall only cover cases of high public interest which are pre-approved by the CGA.”
Hartford Courant

Following a complaint by a national legal news service, the state of Vermont issued an emergency order effective Monday directing court clerks to make public all lawsuits as soon as they are filed. Previously, state court rules required clerks to keep lawsuits secret until defendants had been served — a violation of the public’s First Amendment right to access to court records, according to a federal case brought against Vermont by Courthouse News Service. The state initially said it would defend the confidentiality practice, but a further examination by Vermont lawyers, the Court Administrator’s Office and the Supreme Court determined a change was appropriate, Deputy Attorney General Joshua Diamond said.
Burlington Free Press