Transparency News 7/14/14

Monday, July 14, 2014

State and Local Stories

It’s not the size of the penalty, it’s the principle behind it, but that principle depends on which side you’re on. The state Supreme Court has ordered the nonprofit Energy & Environment Legal Institute to pay $250 in damages to former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann and the school following the institute’s failed legal bid to obtain Mann’s emails regarding climate change research. The institute, formerly known as the American Tradition Institute, filed the suit in 2011, after UVa refused to turn over about 12,000 emails requested under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The court’s order was three sentences long and did not detail the rationale behind the award, just the amount.
Daily Progress

A.E. Dick Howard, a state constitutional expert from the University of Virginia, has billed the state $9,250 for his budget consultation with the Attorney General’s Office. Howard, whose consultation has concluded, charged the state for 18.5 hours of work at his rate of $500 per hour.
Times-Dispatch

Nobody much likes to talk about it at city halls or county offices, but it costs money to have elected officials meet once or twice a month to make rules for a community or decide how to spend taxpayers' funds. Few Peninsula-area localities disclose elected officials' pay in budgets, annual financial reports or websites. Hardly any have changed their pay rates or benefits in years. "It's not something that's at the forefront," said Newport News council member Herbert H. Bateman Jr., who was the sole vote against the city's last pay hike for council members, back in 2001. Newport News and Hampton, like most of the state's larger cities, pay council members the maximum allowed by state law. Poquoson pays its council members a fraction of what state law says it could. Peninsula counties tend to peg supervisor pay at state guidelines, though Isle of Wight pays more.
Daily Press

The government’s corruption case against former Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, hangs on the same man who allegedly corrupted them, Jonnie R. Williams Sr. His company, then called Star Scientific, was under investigation last year when Williams agreed to testify against the McDonnells in exchange for an extraordinary, rarely granted form of immunity, lawyers for Virginia’s former first couple say.
Times-Dispatch

It’s starting to look like a mass exodus of Democratic lawmakers from the Virginia General Assembly. Four have given up their seats in recent weeks. Only one of those resignations has sparked a federal grand jury investigation. That has some Republicans asking: What’s the difference? What is it about state Sen. Phillip Puckett’s resignation that warrants federal scrutiny when no such probe appears to have been launched in the case of Sen. Henry Marsh? Or Del. Bob Brink? Or Del. Algie Howell? There’s only one possible explanation, Mullins and other Republicans say: The Puckett investigation is a partisan witch hunt launched by President Barack Obama’s Justice Department against Virginia Republicans for thwarting one of Obama’s and Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s key policy initiatives.
Virginian-Pilot

Though the Shockoe Bottom stadium may never come to fruition, the city of Richmond has already spent more than half a million dollars on preliminary work to get the plan to this point. The city has spent $506,798 on contracts with outside vendors for surveys, studies and other consulting and legal work. When asked for an accounting of the costs thus far, city officials provided a list of eight expenditures that went to four firms.
Times-Dispatch

National Stories

An internal District of Columbia police report on the response to the Washington Navy Yard shooting says officers were hindered because they couldn’t access live surveillance-camera footage of the shooter. Military contractor Aaron Alexis killed 12 civilian workers before he was fatally shot by police in September 2013. The report says the contract security guard who was monitoring the surveillance videos locked the door to the control room and didn’t contact law enforcement. That prevented police from tracking Alexis‘ movements in real time or ruling out reports of a second shooter.
Washington Times

Internal investigation files for alleged police misconduct in Chicago will now be made public, officials said Sunday in a statement from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office. With the new policy, the Chicago Police Department will release investigative files relating to allegations of police misconduct in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, according to the statement. Standard FOIA exemptions, including those pertaining to how burdensome the requests would be, will apply to all requests. Records also will be redacted to make certain that no information is released that might compromise investigations or witness confidentiality, including names of complainants or informants, the statement said.
Chicago Tribune

For distressed localities seeking a comeback, governance reform and corruption prevention are key.
Governing

John Seigenthaler, the journalist who edited The Tennessean newspaper, helped shape USA Today and worked for civil rights during the Kennedy administration, died Friday at his Nashville home at age 86, his son said. In his wide-ranging career, Seigenthaler also served on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Politico

When 86-year-old photographer James Prigoff paused to photograph a natural gas storage tank in Boston 10 years ago, he was simply doing what countless of tourists have done before. The colorful tank, painted with a rainbow-like design, is a popular photo op. He had no reason to suspect his snapshot would prompt an ominous visit by a federal agent months later and the addition of his name to a government database of suspicious activity. But his case is hardly unique. Similar circumstances have befallen four other people, who are suing the government over so-called suspicious activity reports, or SARs, filed against them. The plaintiffs—two photographers, a white male convert to Islam, and two men of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent—were all engaged in seemingly innocuous activity. Two of them were photographing sites of aesthetic interest, one was apparently viewing a website about videogames at home, another attempted to buy multiple computers at Best Buy, and the last one caught attention of authorities for standing outside a train station restroom waiting for his mother.
Wired

U.S. state governments should help break a regulatory logjam that currently bans aerial drones from delivering packages, filming movies and monitoring crops and pipelines, officials from a state with extensive drone experience said on Sunday. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lacks rules to govern commercial drone activity, and is widely expected to miss a 2015 deadline for creating them because of their complexity. In the interim, state governments could help with key elements to take a major burden off the FAA.
Reuters

A federal judge Friday gave the IRS one week to hand over details on Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive and how to track it, the second federal judge in as many days to seek more information about the elusive emails. Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia ordered the the tax agency to find out by July 18 what happened to the crashed hard drive responsible for erasing two years worth of the former IRS official’s emails, including whether it’s traceable through a serial number.
Politico

A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm’s request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left “phony negative” reviews of its products on Amazon.com. The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena’s to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a “campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace.”
Ars Technica
 

Editorials/Columns

Last week, the FOIA Council posted a new model FOIA Rights & Responsibilities template. (H/T VCOG.)  That template is a document designed to assist executive branch agencies in satisfying Va. Code § 2.2-3704.1’s requirement that they post certain FOIA-related information on their public websites. One of the changes to FOIA in 2014 was an addition to the information executive branch agencies must post.  HB 837, proposed by Delegates Mark L. Keam and David I. Ramadan, required agencies to add the following statement to their websites. Now, no one wants to be a voice of negativity, and any effort by the General Assembly to support FOIA and to inform the public about FOIA seems praise-worthy. But HB 837 deserves little praise because the bill failed to contain two obvious improvements, to itself and to the Code section it amended.
Open Virginia Law

In weathering the 2012 crisis, UVa revealed a great strength — shared governance — when the Faculty Senate and the General Faculty Council courageously asked the BOV to explain its actions and led faculty, staff, students and alumni, as they demonstrated what a vital community we are. Yet the crisis also revealed that shared governance is insecure at UVa. Indeed, the crisis began as a failure of shared governance. Though the climate is much improved, the safeguards of shared governance still are not securely in place.  Until they are, we risk a repetition of the crisis of 2012 — a crisis no one wants to recur.
Walter Heinecke, Daily Progress

Two Saturdays from now, the two main candidates in Virginia’s U.S. Senate election will meet for their first debate. Before the Virginia Bar Association. At The Greenbrier. In White Sulphur Springs. West Virginia. That’s right — the first debate between Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Warner and Republican challenger Ed Gillespie (Libertarian Robert Sarvis didn’t get an invite) — will be out of state. Here’s a modest suggestion for the two candidates: Don’t do it. Don’t debate in West Virginia, that is.
Roanoke Times

Cyberspace, perhaps due to the false sense of anonymity it provides, is awash in verbal vomit, offensive diatribes and morbid musings. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the sordid speech in question always falls outside the confines of the First Amendment safeguard of free expression. That was made abundantly clear last week. On June 30, U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe threw out the jury conviction of former New York Police Department officer Gilberto Valle, the so-called Cannibal Cop, for conspiracy to commit kidnapping via a series of graphic and grisly online posts and communications replete with sexual violence and, as the moniker “cannibal” suggests, cooking and eating women. The case of United States v. Valle is important not only because it comes out of the powerful and prominent Southern District of New York, but also because it tests the limits of both offensive speech protected under the First Amendment and what some might consider to be thought crimes, especially when those thoughts manifest themselves in speech on a game-changing medium where almost anything seems to go.
Clay Calvert, Star-Exponent