Transparency News, 6/5/20

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Thursday released data on COVID-19 cases for most of the nation’s 15,400 nursing homes. Administrator Seema Verma said in a call with reporters that 88% of the homes had complied with the mandate to provide information, and had reported 95,000 confirmed cases and 32,000 deaths.
The Roanoke Times

Capt. Stuart Terry was fed up. With guards sleeping on duty. With one watching porn on courthouse computers. With valuables disappearing — including a judge’s computer from his chambers. For years, Terry watched deputies working under him protect judges, lawyers and the public in Norfolk’s eight-story, $123 million courthouse. But every night, Terry and other sworn law enforcement officers from the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office hand over the job of watching the building to relatively inexperienced and underpaid private security guards contracted by the city. . . . Terry wasn’t the only person frustrated with Top Guard, and the courthouse wasn’t the only place where the company was failing to do its job. City officials keep their own running list of problems in a spreadsheet titled “Top Guard Security Issues.” They recorded nearly 100 incidents between 2015 and January when The Virginian-Pilot made a public records request for the document.
The Virginian-Pilot

Virginia paid $60,000 to settle a race discrimination lawsuit filed by a former Radford University administrator, a state record shows. A Roanoke federal judge dismissed the case May 18 at the request of both sides with about eight weeks remaining before it was to be tried before a jury. The Virginia Department of Treasury, which protects state agencies against financial loss, released the settlement amount Tuesday at the request of The Roanoke Times after the university declined to do so. Court records do not contain the amount or any terms.
The Roanoke Times

As they seem to do in all of our lives, concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic dominated discussions in Monday’s regular meeting of the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors.  This was the third regular meeting held on the Zoom video conferencing platform and conducted under the rules of the county’s emergency continuity of government ordinance. Board Chair Christine Smith topped her list of priorities as helping the county’s first responders and improving communications methods countywide.  She also pushed for opening in-person Rappahannock County meetings and resuming the full range of work. She requested amending the county’s emergency continuity of government ordinance to remove the requirement for local public bodies to wait to hold physically attended public meetings until the start of Phase Two [now set for Friday] of the governor's Forward Virginia Blueprint.  Smith reported that the counties surrounding Rappahannock have found ways to conduct meetings with in-person quorums. Warren County, she said is still holding in-person meetings. Orange and Culpeper counties hold Zoom meetings, but their subject matter is not as restricted as Rappahannock’s. 
Rappahannock News

Suffolk City Council had another first Wednesday for its meeting — the first in which everyone in the chamber wore masks. Some, but not all speakers, pulled down their masks when speaking during the meeting. The chamber had an additional podium for public speakers set back from the podium normally used, though city staff used the main podium. It was the first meeting in which all of council was back in the same room and in which the public was allowed to be present since March 31, when council held an emergency meeting using social distancing measures. The measures were put into place in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Suffolk News-Herald