Transparency News 6/30/16

State and Local Stories

New Clinton campaign emails show that there was communication with top ally and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe on his plan to let 206,000 felons vote in the fall election, a move GOP officials said was aimed at guaranteeing Hillary Clinton the purple state. The emails were delivered to Republican State Sen. Bryce Reeves who sought them under the Freedom of Information Act. In his letter seeking the info, he suggested a Clinton-McAuliffe coordination.
Washington Examiner

One month before a high-ranking Richmond Public Schools official resigned, citing interference from School Board members as the cause, board Chairman Jeffrey Bourne chastised colleagues for getting in the way of administrators. In the letter delivered May 16, Bourne took members to task for participating in “school-based meetings, specifically in their capacity as board members.” This, Bourne wrote, “has caused great confusion and concern among the administration and school-based personnel.” The letter followed a March email sent by the board’s legal counsel over worries about board members attending student-related meetings at schools.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

An audit of Norfolk Treasurer Anthony Burfoot’s office, launched shortly after his indictment on federal corruption charges, showed no major problems with how the agency handles money. “We found the treasurer implemented adequate management controls to ensure public funds are safeguarded against theft or misappropriation,” says a report sent to Norfolk City Council members Tuesday. The auditors noted two issues: Bank account reconciliations didn’t have enough information, and the ownership information on one account included Burfoot’s name. The latter problem is not new; the report says the previous treasurer, Thomas Moss, was listed by name on the same account.
Virginian-Pilot

Culpeper County Public Schools Superintendent Tony Brads provided several benefits to utilizing BoardDocs, a paperless, online agenda solution, for the Culpeper County School Board before Monday’s work session. In a recent memo, Brads listed the following as endorsements for implementing the new system: saves time, improves policy management, transparency, reduces the need for staff intervention and provides comparative information. There’s a one-time $1,000 start-up fee and a special subscription rate for Virginia School Board Association members of $10,200 annually, according to Brads. School board chair Nate Clancy said board members voted in favor of it, following in the footsteps of Culpeper town and county officials and other local school districts. Brads also mentioned how BoardDocs would reduce the need for staff intervention as well. “For example, when Freedom of Information Act requests are made or when staff/board needs information — making information available and easily searchable for everyone drastically reduces the amount of time that staff must spend helping other staff, board, the public and media find information from past meetings. The interface is very easy to use,” he added.
Star-Exponent

In the span of one docket item, Alexandria City Council voted to yield more approval powers to city staff, but were more wary of a proposal that would give final approval powers to the Planning Commission. At the City Council meeting on June 18, staff piggybacked a proposal to amend the city’s charter onto a text amendment that would delegate City Council’s discretionary approval to the Planning Commission. The main text amendment approved in a 6-1 vote expanded the city staff’s administrative review powers, meaning changes to a business’s operations that doesn’t require them to seek City Council approval. 
The Connection


National Stories
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The past month has seen a flurry of legislative activity by states seeking to regulate access to video from police body cameras. New Hampshire, Minnesota and Louisiana recently passed laws exempting some video from disclosure, while several other states are considering bills that place privacy restrictions on access. Bodycams have become increasingly popular as tools to ensure police transparency, but releasing the footage has prompted privacy concerns. Most state open records laws would consider body camera videos to be public records, but also include some exemptions from release for records that would violate a subject's privacy.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

A liberal advocacy group has no right to record public meetings of Missouri Senate committees, a state appeals court ruled Tuesday. The Missouri Western District Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Progress Missouri that argued the state Senate violated the Sunshine Law when it repeatedly blocked the group from recording public committee hearings. The court ruled Tuesday that the Senate is within its constitutional powers to establish its own rules. Blocking Progress Missouri’s attempt to record public hearings doesn’t violate the law, the court said, because the Senate staff records hearings and makes those recordings available to the public.
Kansas City Star

Editorials/Columns

In Virginia, the General Assembly elects state judges and jealously protects its prerogative to do so. South Carolina is the only other state that shares that approach. For ages, lawmakers – more precisely, those legislators constituting the majority caucuses in the House and Senate – picked judges behind closed doors. They looked upon it, more or less, as their business, not yours. A shift in partisan control of the General Assembly about 15 years ago fed into some rethinking and the current Virginia Judicial Performance Evaluation emerged in 2006. This thing (when funded) is administered by the state Supreme Court, but with the evaluation mechanics actually handled by VCU’s Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory. The upshot is that lawyers appearing before the judges fill out forms expressing their feelings toward these judges. The results then form the basis, theoretically, for members of the General Assembly to determine whether a given judge should keep his or her job. Imagine applying the same thinking to other fields of endeavor – say, sports.
Virginian-Pilot

This is as good a time as any to denounce U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s plan to release redacted transcripts of the 911 call made by Omar Mateen, the shooter in the Orlando massacre. It had already been reported that Mateen had called a newspaper just before the shooting to claim responsibility in behalf of ISIS, and a similar call to emergency dispatchers reportedly contains the same rhetoric. But Washington won’t let the public see those words. We can read some parts of the transcript, but not those apparently referring to his real or imagined connection to ISIS. Ms. Lynch said this will be done to avoid “re-victimizing” the victims and to avoid repeating Mateen’s “propaganda.” But isn’t censorship of the truth also a form of propaganda?
Daily Progress