Transparency News 7/27/16

The news on access and transparency is light today, so for your enjoyment: A little reminder that closed-door deals have bothered those on the outside since our country's beginnings.
https://youtu.be/etWMMTjWwfk




National Stories
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A federal judge is faulting the State Department for slacking off in its effort to process Freedom of Information Act requests after the diplomatic agency finished cranking out about 30,000 of Hillary Clinton's emails earlier this year. In an order Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras largely rejected a State Department request for a 27-month extension to respond to conservative group Citizens United's demands for emails among four former State officials and individuals at the Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm close to the Clintons, Teneo. The judge said State's own data showed a "marked drop" in resources devoted to FOIA processing at the agency in February, around the time the last batch of emails Clinton turned over to State were publicly released.
Politico

Maine Gov. Paul LePage likes to jot down and fire off personal notes – notes to lawmakers, citizens or just about anybody else who happens to either please him or displease him. Dozens of messages have been sent to lawmakers since LePage took office in 2011. Those that have been made public by people on the receiving end provide a glimpse of the chief executive’s unfiltered thoughts and policy positions, and his feelings about lawmakers and Maine residents who have been critical of him. LePage’s staff said there is no record of what the governor writes because the notes are never copied or archived, unless a copy of one is returned in a message back to the governor. LePage’s press secretary, Adrienne Bennett, and his communications director, Peter Steele, said they believe the notes are considered personal messages and his office is not required to retain copies of them. State Archivist David Cheever and Maine Attorney General Janet Mills are among those who have a different view.
Portland Press Herald


Editorials/Columns

Board members, as gubernatorial appointees, are responsible to the state — whether you define that in the legal sense of state government or the wider, civic sense of the state being all Virginians. They are not there to operate their schools as independent fiefdoms. They are actually there carrying out state policy, no different than gubernatorial appointees to the Board of Corrections or the Virginia Sheep Industry Board. And they are certainly not there to rubber-stamp whatever the administration proposes. And that brings us to a proposal made by David Ramadan, a former Republican state legislator from Loudoun County. In a commentary published in The Roanoke Times on July 21, he proposed changing the name of the governing boards at state universities from “board of visitors” to “board of trustees.” He thinks the name change will underscore to appointees just what their solemn duty is. “They are expected to ‘govern,’ not ‘visit’ campuses once every other month to watch football games and rubber-stamp administration decisions,” Ramadan says. “Their loyalty must always be to the Commonwealth as trustees charged with protecting public assets, not hiding them. They are there to serve, not be cheerleaders.” Only Virginia calls members of its university governing boards “visitors.” The term dates back centuries to British academia, when the “visitor” was a royal appointee sent in as a neutral party to arbitrate disputes between students and administrators. Virginia adopted the term in the colonial era to refer to the governing body at the College of William & Mary, and it has been in use ever since. There is no legal difference between a “visitor” and a “trustee,” but Ramadan is right: The latter does suggest a greater sense of responsibility.
Roanoke Times