Transparency News 5/2/18

Wednesday
May 2, 2018

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state & local news stories

"The rate of unrecorded votes in the House dropped from 88% in 2017 to 33% this year."

ICYMI, Transparency Virginia released its fourth report on sunshine in the General Assembly. This year's report notes the many areas of improvement in transparency, most notably the adoption of House Rule 18c that requires a recorded vote to defeat proposed legislation in committee or subcommittee. As a result, the rate of unrecorded votes in the House dropped from 88 percent in 2017 to 33 percent this year.
Read the report here

The president of George Mason University has ordered an inquiry into whether big-money donors are being given undue influence over academic matters, after documents were released showing that the Charles Koch Foundation had been given a voice in hiring and firing professors. The university president, Angel Cabrera, wrote in an email to faculty Monday night that he was ordering the investigation after learning of documents revealing “problematic gift agreements.”  The newly released documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Samantha Parsons of UnKoch My Campus, a group that seeks to expose the influence of the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch over colleges and universities. “The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that Koch really demonstrated the way in which any big donor could have influence over academia if the university is willing to agree to those terms,” Ms. Parsons, a former George Mason student, said. Ms. Parsons said she believed that there were other Koch Foundation agreements that had not been released. “If they’re saying the problem is null and void, they need to release all the agreements that haven’t expired,” Ms. Parsons said.
The New York Times

Virginia has reached two milestones in its long, litigious effort to disentangle the state’s vast information technology network from a multibillion-dollar contract with Northrop Grumman. The state awarded a $120 million, five-year contract this week to the North American subsidiary of Atos, a French-based global technology company, to provide advanced managed security services to state executive branch agencies. The deal also provides for extending the five-year term. The agreement, announced Monday, is the fourth contract the state has awarded for services that had been provided solely by Northrop Grumman under a $2.4 billion, 13-year contract that will expire in mid-2019. On the same day, Virginia completed the transition of more than 55,000 state employees to a new, Google-based messaging system, after a costly, protracted stalemate between the state’s IT agency and Northrop Grumman over the terms of their increasingly bitter divorce.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

stories of national interest

Since 1967, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has provided the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.
McClatchy

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley is launching another Sunshine Law investigation into fellow Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, this one centered on the governor’s use of social media. Hawley’s office had previously agreed with Greitens that his social media accounts were private, telling the Star in February that it would not require Greitens to turn over private messages, names of users who were blocked or emails used to create his social accounts. But newly revealed emails cast doubt on whether Greitens can withhold such information from the public. Hawley’s office said it would begin the new investigation after The Star asked about emails that appear to show a state employee helping craft a Facebook post for the governor at a time when Greitens had only one Facebook page, which he had used for his campaign.
The Kansas City Star

The caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States sought the world's attention as scores of migrants traveled through Mexico on a journey to escape their violent homelands. Now that the group has arrived at the border, the next steps in their journey will unfold mostly out of public view. The caravan first drew attention in the U.S. when President Donald Trump promised that his administration would seek to turn the families away. The rest of the asylum-seeking process will happen slowly and secretively in immigration courts. The courts often conduct business behind closed doors. Files are not public, and, unlike criminal or civil courts, access for journalists and others is limited.
The Virginian-Pilot