Transparency News 6/3/16
State and Local Stories
The Library of Virginia is seeking to hire three Records & Information Management Analysts. Please see the job ad below. Applications should be submitted via the state web site, https://virginiajobs.peopleadmin.com for position #00081 by June 22, 2016. We hope you’ll consider joining us!
Library of Virginia
Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) mistakenly restored the right to vote to several violent felons currently in prison or on supervised probation, as part of his sweeping clemency order, records show. Among the 206,000 felons who were awarded voting rights are some high-profile killers whose crimes shocked their small communities. McAuliffe’s spokesman, Brian Coy, attributed the errors to flaws in a system officials devised to identify convicted felons in Virginia. “This is obviously a massive administrative undertaking,” Coy said. “We are working constantly to refine the working administrative database that we’re using to implement this process. As we are made aware of ways we can refine it, we’re executing those refinements immediately.”
Washington Post
In its lawsuit against Augusta County Sheriff Donald Smith, a county deputy, the commissioner of the revenue and a local bail bondsman, Nexus Services Inc. makes the claim that a part-time county employee downloaded an Adolph Hitler emoji from a white supremacist website, which was then passed around in county emails. Following a Nexus press conference Thursday in Harrisonburg, where speakers called for the part-time employee's firing, the Harrisonburg commissioner of the revenue issued a press release refuting the claim that the emoji was downloaded directly from a white supremacist website. "My office is not a party to the lawsuit in which the allegation is made. However, I investigated the employee’s internet and email usage. As a result of that investigation, I can confirm the employee obtained the emoji in question from a simple google search for 'smiley face;' he did not access any white supremacist website including the website identified in the lawsuit; and no discriminatory, harassing or inflammatory emojis were directed at, related to or referred to any taxpayer," said Karen Rose.
News Leader
National Stories
A bill reducing fees and setting specific deadlines for when South Carolina governments must release documents requested by the public appears dead for this year. Pickens Sen. Larry Martin said that other senators want to debate the Freedom of Information Act overhaul and there is no time left with the session ending Thursday. The bill has been on hold since Walterboro Sen. Margie Bright Matthews objected to the bill after it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in March. Bluffton Rep. Weston Newton pointed out senators would have had plenty of time to debate it without that protest.
Aiken Standard
If you happen to be a journalist or just a plain old citizen in Colorado, you have a legal right to ask for information under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA). Unless you happen to live here in Basalt—in this bucolic town where the waters of the Frying Pan and Roaring Fork Rivers happily commingle to produce year-round, world-class, gold-medal flyfishing. Unless you happen to be Mary Kenyon, a marketing guru who lives in Basalt, does consulting work for the Town, has a law degree, and had the temerity to ask for all communications—before and after election day in April 2016—between Mayor Jacque Whitsitt and Town Clerk Pamela Schilling, when Whitsitt was a candidate for Mayor and Schilling’s duties included being designated Election Clerk. Instead of simply producing the records, the Town of Basalt decided in Executive Session to sue Kenyon—and to simultaneously fire a warning shot against those who might deign to legally question the Mayor, the Clerk, or the results of the election.
Huffington Post
City officials in Chicago plan to release videos, reports and other materials next week from about 100 police incidents, including officer-involved shootings, as part of an effort to improve public trust in Chicago police, according to a memo obtained Friday by the Chicago Tribune. The impending release of the materials comes after Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Police Accountability Task Force _ formed as part of the fallout from the court-ordered release last November of the Laquan McDonald shooting video _ recommended that videos of police-related incidents be made public within 60 days.
Governing
The D.C. public records law requires agencies to respond when they get a “request reasonably describing any public record.” But the text begs the questions – what’s reasonable? And does an agency get to decide, on its own, whether or not to process a broad request it considers vague and which would likely yield thousands of pages of responsive records? The D.C. Court of Appeals in an opinion issued Thursday (26) held that no law allows agency staff to decide that a request is too vague to process on a theory of “void for volume” and also while the police did some looking, it wasn't enough. The opinion came in another in a long series of court cases by the police officers’ union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) challenging late or incomplete responses of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to its records requests.
D.C.Open Government Coalition
Editorials/Columns
Leaders in Maryland, Virginia and the District have produced a plan, in the form of coordinated legislation, to set up a functioning commission to oversee safety in the rail-transit system. Unfortunately, the plan has a fatal flaw. The commission would be broadly endowed with investigative and regulatory powers, invested with the authority to issue subpoenas, rejigger Metro’s budget to prioritize safety and slap the agency with warnings and fines if it fails to comply with corrective orders. That sounds promising, almost as if Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and District Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) were dead serious about reestablishing trust and accountability in a transit system on whose shoulders the economy of the nation’s capital depends. So why would they at the same time subvert that same project by carving out a zone of secrecy in which to shroud the new safety commission’s work, including investigations it would conduct of incidents that could affect and imperil hundreds or thousands of passengers?
Washington Post
Comparing how Winchester and Frederick County schedule and conduct closed sessions of its respective governing bodies may be less an apples-to-apples exercise than, say, apples to oranges. Or even bananas. At least that’s what City Council President John Willingham more than implied Thursday morning in providing "context" to our editorial reference in that day’s Star relative to time consumed by the two localities in executive sessions. "In consulting, discussing, we’re not similar to the county," Mr. Willingham said. "They go about things differently." How so? The council president intimated that he and his colleagues and city staff may not "share" as much documentation beforehand as the Board of Supervisors and county staff do. He also suggested legal consultation — input from the county attorney — may be initiated before matters are discussed in closed session. In other words — and we don’t know any other way to say this — the county embarks on its executive sessions with a higher level of preparation.
Winchester Star
Henry Kissinger is smart. When he left as secretary of State, he wanted to make sure that his communications (it was phone records then since email didn’t really exist) weren’t available to political enemies under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That was tricky, since FOIA is supposed to be biased in favor of disclosure, with the presumption being that anything that isn’t exempt by law must be turned over on request, with close calls going to the requester. To defeat this, Kissinger — without consulting the National Archives or a similar office at the State Department — removed his phone call records from the State Department to the Nelson Rockefeller estate; less than two months later he donated them to the Library of Congress, under agreements that the records would not be made public for many years without the consent of the other parties to the calls, which was unlikely to be forthcoming. To make a long story short, the Supreme Court eventually held that when someone files a Freedom of Information Act request with an agency, the agency only has to furnish documents that are in its custody. So Henry Kissinger is smart. And Hillary probably thought she was being smart by setting up a private email server outside the federal government’s control.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, USA Today
