Transparency News 4/6/16

State and Local Stories

General Assembly lawmakers killed 1,221 of the nearly 3,000 pieces of legislation that were introduced during the recently concluded 2016 legislative session. But more than two-thirds of the killed bills, 834, died without a recorded vote in committee — an 18 percent increase over the 50 percent of bills that died without a recorded vote last year, according to an analysis by the Virginia Public Access Project. The VPAP numbers reflect what appears to be an widening gap between the people sworn to conduct the public’s business and the public’s right to know what is decided. “The number of bills that do not receive a recorded vote has consistently increased year over year,” said Megan Rhyne, director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

The problems that led to Jamycheal Mitchell’s death last summer in the Hampton Roads Regional Jail were known long before he died, but no one, including the legislature and state and local agencies, addressed them. They should now, a report from Office of the State Inspector General concludes. The report outlines a series of failures by people who touched Mitchell’s life once he was in the criminal justice system, including in the court, the Portsmouth Department of Behavioral Healthcare Services, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, and inside the jail itself. It does not lay out the sequence of events that led to his death or mention Mitchell by name.
Virginian-Pilot

Wlliamsburg-James City County Commonwealth's Attorney Nate Green views body cameras worn by police officers as a key tool in prosecutions. The new technology removes some of the ambiguity from encounters between law enforcement officers and citizens, Green said. But the video access leads to added work for attorneys in his office. In the fiscal 2017 budget proposed by James City County Administrator Bryan Hill, the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office would receive more than $80,000 to hire another lawyer, largely in response to the increased workload created by the body cameras. "We knew that the introduction of body cameras in all cases was going to add to our workload," Green said. "Instead of reading a police report and preparing 25 to 30 minutes, you watch an hour's worth of body camera footage, it's going to add up. I think we roughly estimated it that once the county goes to uniform body cameras, we'll have an additional 2,500 hours worth of preparation time," Green said.
Virginia Gazette

W. Howard Myers remained Petersburg’s mayor following a tumultuous City Council meeting Tuesday, but the panel will meet again next week to discuss replacing him. The council is facing substantial public pressure to strip Myers of his mayoral title, and one of his council colleagues — Ward 1 Councilwoman Treska Wilson-Smith — proposed following through with that Tuesday. Instead, the council opted to meet again Monday to further discuss the motion and make a better-informed decision, Vice Mayor Samuel Parham said after the meeting, which lasted more than three hours. “The city attorney wants to review (the motion) because everything we do here on council has to be in order,” Parham said. Myers was absent from Tuesday’s meeting. On his Facebook page, he wrote in the afternoon that he had the flu.
Richmond Times-Dispatch


National Stories
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Tanya Cordle, the Bluff City, Tenn., alderwoman who championed a proposal to repair the city’s sewer system and strongly favors dissolution of the town government, resigned Tuesday during a meeting in which the board was reviewing the sewer project. Cordle left right after the Board of Mayor and Aldermen approved meeting minutes for two special-called meetings held in March. She told the Bristol Herald Courier that she resigned because the minutes from the March 3 and March 22 meetings excluded the citizens’ comments. “I feel like the citizens’ comments are one of the most important things,” Cordle said. “That’s their voice being heard. ...I feel like all the citizens should be able to read it in case they feel the same way and that makes them feel like they are being heard.”
Bristol Herald Courier

For years, the federal government, states and some cities have enthusiastically made vast troves of data open to the public. Acres of paper records on demographics, public health, traffic patterns, energy consumption, family incomes and many other topics have been digitized and posted on the web. This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills. A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.
Governing

Editorials/Columns

It's sad when the public doesn't take much of an interest in the issues of the day.  It's particularly unfortunate when meetings of important government boards — such as city councils — are only sparsely attended. So when something does pique the interest of the people and they actually turn out to voice their concerns, the board or council should take that as an opportunity for civic engagement that's both warranted and welcome. It certainly isn't helpful to treat citizen input at these public meetings as irrelevant. But that's exactly the message the Hampton City Council sent when it recently renamed a new bridge heading into Fort Monroe. There were 20 people signed up to speak that night, a mixture of those wanting to keep the honor to Dr. King and those pushing for another name. Yet in a seeming rush to stifle the debate, the council approved the resolution before these citizens had a chance to talk. Only one council member, Donnie Tuck, objected.
Daily Press