Transparency News 6/3/19

Monday
June 3, 2019

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state & local news stories

Thirty-five minutes. That's all the time it took for a gunman to end 12 lives and lose his own. Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer may have called the tragedy at Municipal Building 2 Friday the city's darkest hour, but there was some light — the heroism of the officers who ran into gunfire to save lives. Police scanner traffic archived online gives a minute-by-minute account of how the worst mass shooting in the city's history unfolded.
The Virginian-Pilot

Before gunning down 12 people at a city building on Friday, a longtime public utilities engineer had emailed his resignation to superiors, giving two weeks' notice just hours before the tragedy unfolded, officials said Sunday. They did not provide any details about the gunman's email or what else he did that morning.“We’re determining where that letter is,” City Manager Dave Hansen said at a Sunday morning news conference. “He notified his chain of command that morning.”
The Virginian-Pilot

stories of national interest

The Project On Government Oversight has obtained new details about legal opinions from the Justice Department’s secretive Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), including 13 previously unreleased memo titles, and the dates of memos whose titles remain redacted. Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the newly released memo titles reveal some of the subjects this influential office has considered in the last two decades, from war powers to the board of the Kennedy Center.
POGO

The head of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government said Thursday the 111th state General Assembly “did no harm” to government transparency this year, but warned of possible threats to open government on the horizon. Deborah Fisher, executive director of the coalition, said Tennessee lawmakers “took a step in the right direction” for protecting open records during the first half of their two-year session, which ended earlier this month. That came when the state House of Representatives approved a new process for adopting exemptions to the Tennessee Public Records Act that would give stakeholders an additional chance to voice their concerns.
Johnson City Press

 

editorials & columns

They say they only want to hide tactical information about their response to the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville; releasing specifics on tactics could compromise public safety and endanger law enforcement personnel in case they need to deploy here for another incident in the future. Fair enough. But the subtext in their fight against releasing information suggests something far different. Something alarming.
The Daily Progress