Transparency News, 6/16/20

Six residents of Monument Avenue are joining the legal effort to block Gov. Ralph Northam from removing a massive statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, arguing that taking the bronze figure down would hurt property values and jeopardize the tax benefits of living in a National Historic Landmark District. Only one of the residents — Helen Marie Taylor, a 96-year-old who called protesters “snakes,” “scoundrels” and “graffiti goons” in an interview with The Washington Post last week — is named in the new filing. The other five are petitioning to participate anonymously and are listed in the filings as John, Joseph, Sally, Charles and Thomas Does.
Virginia Mercury

A Prince William County resident is suing the county’s board of supervisors following an unpublicized meeting of five members of the governing body the day after a riot broke out in the county, near Manassas. Alan Gloss, an eight-year resident of the Coles District and the plaintiff in the civil suit, says five the Democratic members of the Board of County Supervisors who attended the meeting violated Virginia Freedom of Information Act which requires meetings with more than two elected officials to be advertised to the public before they begin. Gloss, and the Republican supervisors who weren’t there, allege elected leaders in attendance opined about police policies concerning the use of force, and how they vow to change those policies.
Potomac Local
UPDATE: A Manassas resident has temporarily withdrawn his civil lawsuit claiming five members of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors held an illegal meeting when they met with police and community leaders in the wake of protests last month. Gloss told the court he did not yet have a lawyer to represent his lawsuit. He requested to amend his complaint to individually name the five supervisors who attended the meeting, instead of suing the eight-member board as a whole. “I see the individual members need to be identified,” Gloss told the court. Judge Wallace Covington III, General District Court chief judge, allowed Gloss to use a one-time only legal mulligan. Gloss said the move means he is removing his complaint and plans to re-file the lawsuit at a later time. During the hearing Monday, County Attorney Michelle Robl said to be in violation, the court has to find that there was a meeting violation and that there was a willful intent to violate the requirement.
InsideNoVa

Live streaming public meetings have become the norm as a way to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease. But Tuesday’s Planning Commission meeting in Chesterfield County will welcome citizens back in-person — with some caveats. Chesterfield’s Planning Director Andrew Gillies says he wanted to accommodate the residents who’ve been asking for in-person meetings to happen again. And now with the county reopening public buildings that comply with health and safety guidelines, he feels they can do that.  But Gillies says between all the county officials and applicants who are there to speak Tuesday, there isn’t enough space for the public. Gilles says monitors will be set up in the hallways for people to watch the meeting before they’re called in to speak. 
VPM

University of Mary Washington President Troy Paino has announced the creation of an advisory panel tasked with reviewing the campus police response to the May 31 protests in downtown Fredericksburg. According to UMW Police Chief Michael Hall, who responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from a group of students, five UMW police officers in three police vehicles responded voluntarily to the call for assistance from the Civil Disturbance Team on May 31.
The Free Lance-Star

In a victory for animal rights activists, a federal judge has thrown out portions of a North Carolina law designed to discourage undercover employees at farms and other workplaces from taking documents or footage. Several groups sued state officials for a 2015 law that provides civil penalties and damages against people whom bill supporters labeled as purposefully getting jobs to steal company secrets or record purported maltreatment. The plaintiffs, which include Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the measure violated the U.S. Constitution by stifling their ability to investigate employers for illegal or unethical conduct.
The Virginian-Pilot

After a closed-session discussion, the Elkton Town Council ultimately voted 5-1 Monday night to approve a permit that will allow a high school student-led Black Lives Matter protest on Wednesday. Plans for the event had touched off a social media-fueled controversy after a Facebook post calling for armed counter-protesters went viral over the past several days.  At their Monday night meeting, streamed for the public on Zoom, members of the Elkton Town Council seemed hesitant to approve a permit for the event because of concerns that it may become unsafe. During the meeting, the council amended its agenda to include closed session discussion of the matter, and a town staff member indicated in the public chat forum that a public vote on the permit application would not be held during the meeting. Reporters from The Citizen and the Daily News-Record raised questions about basis for entering closed session under the Virginia law governing closed sessions and sought clarification on why a public vote would not be held. The council eventually returned to open session and voted to approve the permit.
Harrisonburg Citizen
 

 

On a recent Saturday night, Jackie Eicholz heard sirens — lots of them. Eicholz, who lives in California’s Santa Cruz County, got out her phone, opened up a pair of police-scanner apps (5-0 Radio Police Scanner and Police Scanner Radio & Fire) and began trying to piece together what was happening.  Eicholz and thousands of other Americans are turning to police-scanner apps as protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis continue to rock the country. Crime-report app Citizen and encrypted-messaging app Signal are also seeing spikes in downloads as events unfold in people’s neighborhoods. Some of the apps saw downloads jump by more than 300% in the two weeks after Floyd’s death as protests for racial justice spread, according to Apptopia. “Different events drive downloads for different apps,” said Adam Blacker, Apptopia’s vice president of insights and global alliances, who added that food delivery apps spiked at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Each of these types of apps serves a different purpose, and they can be helpful for protesters, residents and business owners trying to stay on top of rapidly changing situations. Here’s more about how each of these kinds of apps can be helpful, and what to keep in mind if you use them.
c|net

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention email released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) tells communications staff to ignore media requests from Voice of America, according to documents published by the Knight First Amendment Institute. Documents released under the FOIA include an April 30 email sent from Michawn Rich with the subject “Rundown.” The email describes a CDC media request process to help a co-worker named Rachael to “navigate [her] new role.” Rich, a Department of Agriculture spokesperson, was moved to the CDC to help handle communications related to the pandemic earlier this year, Politico reported. Under a section on approving media requests before they are sent to the Department of Health and Human Services or Office of the Vice President, the email states: “NOTE: as a rule, do not send up requests for Greta Van Sustern [sic] or anyone affiliated with Voice of America.”
Voice of America

The Trump administration doesn’t plan to release details about companies that received billions of dollars through a high-profile federal coronavirus-relief initiative, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said this week — reversing earlier guidance. The Trump administration believes names of borrowers from the Paycheck Protection Program and the amounts they receive are “proprietary,” and “confidential” in many cases, Mnuchin said Wednesday during a Senate committee hearing. But the applications for PPP loans, which are forgivable if borrowers meet certain criteria, say such data will “automatically” be released. Moreover, the Small Business Administration, which oversees the lending program, told Bloomberg News in April that such loan-specific information would be made public “in the near future.”
Bloomberg
 

 

What does Steve Walts have to hide? Last week, the Prince William County school system, which Walts runs, denied a Freedom of Information Act request by the Board of County Supervisors to release the private direct messages Walts sent on Twitter over the past 18 months.  Walts’ Twitter messages are the subject of an official complaint to the school board, which has hired both an outside forensics firm and an outside law firm to help it investigate. For the record, there are 20,268 direct messages to and from Walts in over 2,000 different conversations.  In 18 months.  That’s more than 100 conversations and 1,000 messages a month.  What is relevant is that after releasing a handful of conversations following a FOIA request from Guy Morgan, who filed the initial complaint, the school system is now refusing to release them all.  The school board can end this madness.  Order the school system to release the messages and tell Walts his tenure will be up when his contract expires next June.  It’s a tough decision, but great leaders know how to make tough decisions. And this one is the right call.
InsideNoVa

These days, information about police officers’ actions in addition to the arrests they make is more commonly released. But most of these data sets still lack key details and crucial context, such as corresponding body-camera footage, or published policies on what is allowed (and not) when officers use force. In most cases, releasing data isn’t mandated by law; it’s a matter of what leaders want to do. The Boston Police Department, for example, stopped publishing its annual data on stop-and-frisk incidents after 2016. It took months of public calls for transparency, public records requests, and finally a subpoena to restore the flow of data just last month. BPD’s excuse for the three-year gap in publishing data? Nobody had asked for it. Americans shouldn’t have to beg for data from agencies that have such extraordinary powers. As Art Acevedo, then the police chief in Austin, Texas, and now the chief in Houston made clear five years ago: “This isn’t our data, it’s the people’s data.”
Clarence Wardell and Denice Ross, The Boston Globe