Transparency News, 6/10/2022

Friday
June 10, 2022

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state & local news stories

"The front doors of Alexandria City Public Schools headquarters were locked . . . ALXnow gained access to the meeting via the building’s underground parking garage."

An attorney for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot told the Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday that a judge erred when she closed a 2021 bond hearing for a Newport News police officer charged with murder. Brett Spain, representing both newspapers, said that bond hearings — and documents related to them — are presumed open under the First Amendment and Virginia law. The law, he said, requires that the case for closure or sealing must be “so compelling” that there’s no other choice. Spain told the justices that a primary reason the lower court judge cited for closing the 2021 bond hearing — a general heightened public concern about police officer shootings — falls short. The newspapers are asking the seven-member court to rule that Spencer was incorrect to close the hearing and deny access to related documents. The papers are also asking for the transcript of the closed hearing and for an order unsealing other documents. As the justices began their questioning, they took note of the fact that while the prosecution wanted the 2021 bond hearing closed, the officer's attorney, Timothy Clancy, didn’t push for it.
Daily Press

The Alexandria School Board conducted a closed-door meeting on Tuesday night (June 7) on changes to their operating procedures including a new rule on talking to the media. In the two-hour-long session, the Board went over proposed changes to its operating procedures, as well as “Eight Characteristics of Effective School Boards,” a report from the Center for Public Education. One of the changes would require Board Members to provide their colleagues with any written responses to the media. Another stipulates that individual School Board Members must avoid directly communicating with ACPS staff “about Division business.” In the meeting, Board Member Willie Bailey — who previously said that he will not talk with the media — said that it’s important that School Board Members are all on the same team as part of a strong collaboration of mutual trust. Member Abdel Elnoubi says the proposed change on School Board media relations creates peer pressure against talking with journalists. The front doors of Alexandria City Public Schools headquarters were locked at 7 p.m. on Tuesday night while the School Board conducted a Board retreat — a public meeting — in a third-floor work room of the ACPS Central Office at 1340 Braddock Place. ALXnow gained access to the meeting via the building’s underground parking garage, and the Board clerk confirmed that the doors were locked. She said that ALXnow is the only attendee at such meetings, and that security would unlock the doors.
ALXnow

A group including activists and independent journalists have filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Richmond and dozens of city police officers for an alleged pattern of unlawful arrests, misconduct and harassment amid waves of protests here in 2020. The plaintiffs include Kristopher Goad “Gatsby” and Jimmie Lee Jarvis, two “citizen journalists” who broadcasted information about the protests on their personal Twitter accounts; Andrew Ringle and Eduardo Acevedo, two VCU students who covered the protests as journalists with the student-run Commonwealth Times; and Charles H. Schmidt, Jr., a lawyer who was working with the ACLU of Virginia at the time of the protests in June 2020.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
 

stories of national interest

"Because the records were destroyed they were never retained by the governor’s office.  And thus, failing to produce them did not constitute a violation of Missouri’s open records law."

Though the use of self-destructing text-messaging apps has the practical effect of “side-stepping the reach of Missouri’s Sunshine Law,”their use by former Gov. Eric Greitens and his staff was not illegal, a panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday. While Greitens was still serving as governor, he and his staff used a text-messaging app called Confide. The app allows someone to send a text message that vanishes without a trace after it is read and prevents anyone from saving, forwarding, printing or taking a screenshot of the message. Mark Pedroli, a St. Louis County attorney and founder of the Sunshine and Government Accountability Project, filed a lawsuit in December 2017 arguing Greitens conspired to destroy records to ensure they could not be produced pursuant to an open records request. But on Tuesday, a panel of judges on Missouri’s Western District Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with a lower court ruling that because the records were destroyed they were never retained by the governor’s office.  And thus, failing to produce them did not constitute a violation of Missouri’s open records law.
Missouri Independent

editorials & columns

Compared to standing in line, online saved time and effort in getting stuff done with government. Now, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous use of mobile phones to navigate the web, many of these decades-old design conventions are being rethought. According to analytics.usa.gov, which tracks the federal government’s web traffic, at the time of writing, 53 percent of the 5.4 billion visits to federal sites in the previous 90 days were done on a mobile device. The answer in these mobile times is simplification and reimagining these public sites through plain text. Text can be beautiful — witness harvardlawreview.org — and optimally functional, as boston.gov shows. Text combined with .gov domains and iconography connotes official government status and conveys confidence to users. Such a combination on a light-to-the-touch site was the design criteria for covid.gov, a site that scaled well; received positive notice from users, policymakers and the press; and provided much-needed information and assistance during the pandemic. The Social Security Administration is working on a text-only site too at beta.ssa.gov — the page is attractive, short, fast and optimized for mobile.
Governing