Transparency News 5/23/16

State and Local Stories

A state airplane took Gov. Terry McAuliffe to a couple of weddings, U.Va's Elite Eight game in Chicago and into Cuba over the last eight months, state flight records show. The Daily Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request this month for Department of Aviation records covering the dozens of flights that McAuliffe, or a member of his cabinet, took going back to September, when a similar check was also performed.
Daily Press

In an attempt to determine how many illegal immigrants have been charged with criminal offenses in Virginia since the 2008 legislation, The Times-Dispatch filed a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request with the State Compensation Board for records it maintains on the number of illegal immigration queries of inmates made by all of Virginia’s local and regional jails, along with the results of those queries. The newspaper requested and received data for each year since 2008, when Albo’s law went into effect mandating that state jails collect the numbers and report them to the state. While the large majority of the state’s jails have complied fully with the law’s reporting requirements, several facilities have failed to follow each step of the mandatory reporting process, resulting in skewed numbers being reported to the state. Consequently, many illegal immigrants being held in those facilities were not being counted.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Former Portsmouth City Manager John Rowe and Jim Oliver, the man who hired him, this week defended a setup in which Rowe received retirement pay while working full time, saying a former city attorney wanted it that way. The Virginia Retirement System sent some type of response to Portsmouth this week about the issue. The state has been researching the situation for about nine months and has provided few details except to say that employers are required to report high-level positions to the retirement system and pay contributions for them, and that the law prohibits receipt of a VRS pension for employees who return in VRS-covered positions.
Virginian-Pilot

The Daily Press was named the winner of a First Amendment Award Friday in the 2016 Associated Press Media Editors Innovation in Journalism Awards contest. The paper was honored for its Freedom of Information Act battle with the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia over access to a database of state court records.
Daily Press


National Stories
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The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the NYPD Thursday to get details on the Stingray equipment that cops use to spy on people's cellphones. The NYCLU said it had requested information under the Freedom of Information Law about how the department pays for its Stingrays and what models it is purchasing. Instead, the NYPD refused to provide any data about "basic contractual information that should be part of the public domain," the NYCLU charges.
New York Daily News

Students filing open records requests with the federal government should be eligible for reduced fees, an appeals court ruled Friday. Filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) can sometimes result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in charges that are requested by federal officials for duplicating documents and conducting searches. While some entities — such as the media and teachers at educational institutions — qualify to have these fees reduced, the Defense Department declared that Kathryn Slack, a student, did not. “If teachers can qualify for reduced fees, so can students,” wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh in a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decision released on Friday. “Students who make FOIA requests to further their coursework or other school-sponsored activities are eligible for reduced fees under FOIA because students, like teachers, are part of an educational institution.”
The Hill

David Yanofsky, a reporter for the Atlantic Media publication Quartz, has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to compel the Department of Commerce to release databases containing information about foreign travel to and from the United States. Attorneys for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are representing Yanofsky pro bono. Despite acknowledging that the databases requested are agency records subject to FOIA, the DOC claimed that the databases are “not available under the FOIA,” denied Yanofsky’s request for a fee waiver, and informed him that he would have to purchase the records, which would cost more than $173,000.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press



Editorials/Columns

Examine for a moment how the Fairfax County police leadership responded when one of its officers shot and killed an unarmed man standing in the doorway of his residence in August 2013. Examine for a moment how the Fairfax County police leadership responded when one of its officers shot and killed an unarmed man standing in the doorway of his residence in August 2013. It was transparent and neutral, quite the opposite of what transpired in Fairfax a few years earlier. The mishandling of the Fairfax shooting created considerable upheaval and likely damaged confidence the public may have had in the department.
Free Lance-Star