Transparency News 5/25/17

Thursday, May 25, 2017



State and Local Stories

There are two sides to every FOIA request. I’ve seen them both. As the public information officer for Portsmouth Public Schools, I serve as our FOIA compliance officer. Therefore, I manage the requests that come into the school division. I’ve been here about six months, and I’ve logged more than 50 requests of various complexity. In my previous career as a reporter, I filed FOIA requests to gather information for news articles. I wanted citizens to know how their governments operated, and sometimes documents were the best way to explain that. The information didn’t always come as easily as I hoped. I often felt stonewalled by agencies that didn’t understand the law or didn’t want to follow it. But I learned enough about the law to know my rights, and I often ended up getting what I needed. Although I have served in different roles, my understanding of FOIA remains pretty much the same: public information should be made public and accessible. There are some exemptions, but for the most part, it’s public.
Cherise Newsome, VCOG’s Truth in the Field Blog

Prince William County School Board Chairman Ryan Sawyers is taking legal action against division Superintendent Steven L. Walts, claiming that the administrator is unjustly blocking access to his predecessors’ emails. Sawyers is asking a circuit court judge to order Walts to provide him immediate access to emails sent and received by any previous board chairman, arguing in a court filing that the superintendent is “arbitrarily and capriciously” impeding Sawyers from reviewing past decisions by the board. This dispute first kicked off in late April when Sawyers requested that school staff provide him with full access to all email correspondence from his immediate predecessor on the board, Milt Johns. But Walts refused, and Sawyers decided to file the legal action against him in Prince William County Circuit Court on May 23.
Inside NoVa

Feeding the animals was one of the main chores that Del. Rick Morris' 11-year-old stepson had to do around the family farm. But one day in September 2016, the boy failed to feed the goats and turkeys — and then lied to his parents about it. According to court testimony at a December hearing in Suffolk juvenile court, that lie led Morris to whack the boy on his hands with a wooden kitchen stirring spoon, a red spatula and a folded-over leather belt. The belt also caused bruising on the boy's wrists, leading to a police investigation into that and other allegations of abuse. Suffolk Juvenile and Domestic Relations Judge Robert S. Brewbaker Jr. barred the media from attending the hearing, given that "the key witness in these charges is a child." The Daily Press, joined by The Virginian-Pilot and Smithfield Times, mounted a legal challenge to the closed hearing. Last week, a Circuit Court judge ordered that the transcript of the hearing be released, which it was on Wednesday. At the seven-hour December hearing, Morris faced seven felony charges stemming from four separate incidents in 2016. Brewbaker certified only one of the charges — from the September hand-whacking — to a grand jury. The judge voiced skepticism about the entire case, making clear he thought the prosecution was overcharging Morris.
Daily Press

Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality admitted Wednesday that it provided inaccurate information nearly seven weeks ago about how it plans to handle review of potential water quality impacts of two deeply controversial natural gas transmission pipelines. The admission dismayed people who had celebrated the earlier news that DEQ seemed poised to do a detailed review of the crossings of hundreds of streams and wetlands by the two 42-inch diameter pipelines. James Golden, DEQ’s director of operations, acknowledged Wednesday that miscommunication between the department’s technical and public affairs staff led DEQ to misstate in early April its plans for environmental review of the Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast pipelines.
Roanoke Times

In his spare time from his Prince William board of supervisors role, Corey Stewart has campaigned throughout Virginia around Confederate monuments. In a May 15 Facebook post in response to a white supremacist rally that occurred in Charlottesville in protest of the removal of a Confederate statue, Stewart took aim at a black city council member who voted to remove it, denouncing him as a “bigot” who “foments racial hatred.” A few weeks before that incredible statement, I was curious to find out what his email inbox looked like. I sent in a request asking for any emails mentioning the Confederate monuments (also the terms “Yankee” and “carpetbagger,” just to be thorough) and waited. MuckRock has fought for years now against Virginia’s anti-transparency policy that requires in-state residency to obtain documents. Go figure the Prince William County Attorney’s Office did not miss a chance to make me show my papers. Yikes. But the solution is simple: Any MuckRock user can file a request in my name, using my blessed status as a “Virginia citizen.”It has been a reliable workaround, and no agency has denied a request from me (you) yet.
Muck Rock



National Stories
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Michigan’s FOIA requires that a public body respond to a request for public record within five business days after the request is received. In 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals, in Brandi Cramer v. the Village of Oakley, decided that while a public body must respond to a FOIA request within five business days, there is no specific time frame by which they must fulfill the request. For example, under the court of appeals ruling, a public body would have to send a letter stating that the request was granted (or denied) within five business days, but there was not a specific time in which they would be required to actually provide the requested records. This decision effectively held that there was a difference in a public body’s duty to “respond” and “fulfill” a FOIA request. In April 2017, the Michigan Supreme Court vacated the court of appeals decision in Cramer v Oakley without addressing the merits of the previous opinion. This means public bodies can no longer apply a distinction between responding to a FOIA request and fulfilling it. By vacating the court of appeals decision, the Supreme Court is effectively saying that in order to comply with the Act, a public body must adhere to the tighter timeframe for fulfilling FOIA requests. While the law requires a response within five business days, this is not a hard and fast rule. The statute includes an exception: a public body can issue a notice extending its deadline by no more than 10 days. This is allowed once and only once.
Michigan State University Extension

An environmental advocacy group says it is using the Freedom of Information Act strategically to try to force the Trump administration to restore climate change data that has gone missing since the inauguration. The Center for Biological Diversity made its latest move in this effort on Tuesday when it filed a federal FOIA lawsuit for records that would shed light on any Trump administration directives to scrub climate change-related information from government websites. The group filed a “flurry” of FOIA requests to federal agencies in late March and early April in response to news reports that the new administration had ordered federal agencies to stop using climate-change related words in official communications, according to Amy Atwood, the organization’s counsel.
Courthouse News Service


Editorials/Columns


A disastrously bad decision by the local commission — spending $4.5 million in taxpayer funds to surreptitiously pay off a defaulted loan incurred by a failed airline — cast a bright spotlight on larger issues in the way the airport was run. As a result, the inspector general issued a 23-page report this week making very strong recommendations to the state's Department of Aviation regarding financial oversight. The IG's report puts the Department of Aviation on notice, which means the state office will be looking more closely at the books and cracking down harder on those who aren't in compliance. That in turn puts each individual airport commission on notice. Because no one else around the state wants to go through the meltdown that has happened at the Peninsula Airport Commission. This is a good thing, even if it is unfortunate that our local aiport had to take the fall.
Daily Press

I know Democrats controlled redistricting for decades in Virginia, and Republicans only recently gained the upper hand. What’s different today is the computer mapping software that allows the folks in charge, with pinpoint accuracy, to gather the residential precincts they want, and consign the ones they don’t elsewhere. We’ve seen the fallout of the current process in Virginia and other states. Partisan groups have gone to court, leading to lengthy and costly battles. Judges have overturned congressional districts, saying, for example, how legislators packed black voters into some areas to dilute their clout elsewhere. Other states, including Arizona, have allowed citizens to take a larger role in drawing the boundaries. Virginia’s politicians should, too.
Roger Chesley, Virginian-Pilot