Transparency News 7/3/13

 

Wednesday, July 3, 2013
  State and Local Stories  

Former Virginia Attorney General Mary Sue Terry is in a dispute with her local school board, which has asked her to stay off of school board property and not attend meetings without prior approval. The chairman of the Patrick County school board wrote Friday in a letter to Terry that she “barged” into a closed meeting Thursday with a group of people “and proceeded to totally disrupt the meeting.” Ronnie N. Terry, the board chairman, no relation to Mary Sue Terry, writes that because of the actions, that the former attorney general is not to come onto school board property or attend board meetings “without the express prior written approval of either the chair of the school board or the superintendent.” “Should you come onto school property without such written approval, you will be charged with trespassing,” he writes.

Times-Dispatch

A Democratic lawmaker is urging Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell to “come clean” about gifts from a political donor or resign. State Sen. J. Chapman Petersen of Fairfax County says in a letter to the Republican governor that recent published reports suggest Star Scientific Inc. CEO Jonnie Williams plied the McDonnells with gifts and, in return, was allowed to use the Executive Mansion and the governor’s office to gain credibility for his company. Maureen McDonnell, the governor’s wife, has attended events to promote the company’s dietary supplement. McDonnell spokesman Tucker Martin called Petersen’s letter “blatantly political” and said it “appears to be premised on unconfirmed and inaccurate media reports.”
News Leader

A majority of the faculty in the English department at Virginia Military Institute has resigned as a result of disagreements that stemmed from a change in curriculum, a VMI spokesman said. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Tuesday that seven faculty members have quit and another will leave soon, a year after VMI dismissed a complaint that accused leaders of the department of creating a hostile work environment. According to The Chronicle, the professors, all tenured or tenure-track, alleged that the department administrators established unreasonable performance goals and then retaliated against the professors when they objected.
Times-Dispatch

Two years ago, the capital city was awash in black and gold excitement as the Virginia Commonwealth University men's basketball team made a thrilling March Madness run. Gov. Bob McDonnell got in on the act, as elected officials often do when a hometown team is on a roll, even making a friendly wager on the Rams with his Indiana counterpart. And when VCU went to Houston for the Final Four in early April 2011, McDonnell and members of his family were there to cheer them on thanks to a political donor.
Virginian-Pilot

Despite vocal objections from Albemarle County’s Board of Supervisors, two of the 10 candidates vying for the board’s vacant Scottsville District seat have said they intend to run in the upcoming November special election. When Supervisor Christopher J. Dumler resigned June 5 after serving time in jail for misdemeanor sexual battery, all five of the remaining supervisors were adamant that his replacement hold office strictly in the interim. Supervisor Duane E. Snow went so far as to say he would not approve any candidate who didn’t agree so in writing.
Daily Progress

Hanover County school officials are evaluating how much they pay employees in the wake of criticism for a traffic guard — who also happened to be a county supervisor — who earned $41.25 an hour. Elton J. Wade Sr. retired last month from his traffic guard position for which he was paid more than double the amount the school budget lists as the maximum pay for the position: $19.07 an hour. It’s still unclear how many other school employees are being paid in excess of the school division’s pay scales.
Times-Dispatch

National Stories

A town in Washington state must pay more than half a million dollars to resolve a seven-year lawsuit that brought electronic metadata within the scope of the state public records law, a trial court ruled last week. The City of Shoreline will have to reimburse $438,555 to cover the plaintiffs' costs as Washington agencies are required to cover reasonable attorneys fees for their opponents after losing open records lawsuits. Shoreline also agreed last year to pay a $100,000 statutory penalty after the court found that the city violated the state public records act. Michele Earl-Hubbard, a lawyer for plaintiffs, said that the $485,555 award granted by Superior Court Judge Monica Benton was notable for its size. “In our state it’s one of the highest attorney fee and cost awards in a public records case,” she said.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Federal health officials broke federal laws by stonewalling legal attempts to learn how they created new rules requiring employers to pay for insurance that covers contraception, sterilization and abortion, according to lawyers representing the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. In a lawsuit filed Monday, lawyers for the diocese, including its Catholic Charities group and its Catholic Cemeteries Association, claim federal administrators of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention purposely created extraordinary and illegal barriers to their client obtaining public information about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Months after requesting information in September about how federal officials decided what contraceptive procedures and medications should be covered under the mandate -- and to what extent religious entities must comply with providing insurance coverage for them -- the diocese's lawyers were told fulfilling the requests would take three to five years and could cost them more than $1.8 million, according to Mickey Pohl, who is representing the diocese's legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act on religious grounds. In the process, federal officials violated the Freedom of Information Act, which requires government officials to provide public information in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost, he said.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin could soon be defending himself in front of a judge after liberal blogger and lawyer Matt Campbell filed suit against the Republican July 1 for failure to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request. The suit, filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court, seeks to force Martin's office to turn over documents Campbell, managing editor of the Blue Hog Report, had asked for in a June 10 FOIA request. The request was for files attached to e-mails Campbell had received from an earlier FOIA request on June 2. The first request was for e-mails relating to a wrongful termination lawsuit involving two former State Capitol police officers, who have also made claims of racial discrimination in their lawsuits.
The City Wire

A conservative watchdog group released a half dozen movie parody videos and comedy skits Tuesday by the General Services Administration that were removed from the agency's website after an inspector general report last year revealed lavish agency spending on a Las Vegas conference. Judicial Watch, which obtained the material through a Freedom of Information Act request, said it was tipped to the videos by a current GSA employee, Linda Shenwick. Shenwick, a self-described whistle-blower, said the videos were a waste of time and money.
Fox News

Electronic data breaches put the personal information of 2.5 million Californians at risk in 2012, according to a report released Monday by Attorney General Kamala Harris. State law requires businesses and government agencies to notify consumers when a data breach might have put their personal information at risk. A bill passed in 2012 also requires companies to report a breach to the attorney general when more than 500 consumers' information has been accessed. The report's description of 131 breaches of consumer information marks the first time the information has been made available to the public.
Sacramento Bee

With its new Instagram account, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration shows images of weaponry that people either forgot they had or tried to sneak past airport agents.
CNET News

A number of social media users recently have overstepped the boundary of legal free speechand face jail time for threatening the president’s life. A Secret Service spokesman, Brian Leary, said social media are increasingly useful for finding and tracking threats.
New York Times

A Boston federal judge on Monday refused accused mobster James "Whitey" Bulger’s lawyers’ bid for permission to be more open with the press. U.S. District Judge Denise Casper denied Bulger’s motion to vacate her June 3 order barring the defense from violating a local rule about what lawyers in criminal cases can say to news reporters. The rule limits lawyers to public statements that “quote from or refer without comment to public records of the court.”
National Law Journal

State governments from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic seaboard are attempting to blunt the influence of free-spending super PACs and nonprofits by allowing people to contribute more money to political candidates. Six governors — three Republicans and three Democrats — have signed bills increasing campaign contribution limits so far in 2013, while lawmakers in nearly a dozen other states have introduced similar legislation, a Center for Public Integrity review found.
Center for Public Integrity

At $6,000 a year, the salary for being the mayor of Homestead is a pittance. But Steve Bateman, a barrel-chested booster of this gateway city to the Florida Keys, has found that the position comes with hidden perks. This past February, Bateman leveraged his role as mayor to land a lucrative, secret side job working as a construction consultant for a nonprofit that needs the blessing of the city and county to expand its chain of health clinics. The deal, which the head of the nonprofit, Community Health of South Florida Inc. (CHI), says he did not initiate, pays Bateman $125 an hour — more than $4,500 during one 38-hour work week, according to a sampling of invoices reviewed by the Miami Herald. Bills for other weeks were unavailable for review.
Miami Herald

A controversial rule by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that would require oil and gas extraction companies to disclose government payments was vacated yesterday by a Washington federal judge.
Blog of LegalTimes

Editorials/Columns

Jamison Shabanowitz, VCOG Blog: If an email is sent to a recipient and is deleted before the recipient sees it, does it really exist?  AT&T’s new patent pending technology answers that question with an affirmative “no.” Future CIOs and VITA administrators will have to keep in mind the potential abuses to this new technology when making decisions on upgrades to the State email system. Open records advocates and government records archiving agencies should become wise to the new technology that has the potential to threaten access and maintenance of public records.

Roanoke Times: Roanoke City Council members cannot seem to extricate themselves from the pay-raise trap they stepped in. If only they could crank up the way-back machine and travel to this past winter — December, January, February or even March — and talk about their salary in the context of the city budget. Then, they could have dispensed with the matter transparently and with little fuss or notice.