Transparency News 8/10/15

Monday, August 10, 2015

State and Local Stories

The Daily Press filed a lawsuit against the Virginia Supreme Court's Office of the Executive Secretary on Friday, seeking the release of a comprehensive database of thousands of court records dating back more than a decade. At the heart of the lawsuit is whether the statewide database of criminal court records is covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The lawsuit, filed in Newport News Circuit Court by the Daily Press and reporter Dave Ress, asks the court to order the Office of the Executive Secretary to release the database.
Daily Press

A state agency charged with guiding public officials about Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act says the Prince William Board of Supervisors acted improperly when members retreated into closed session in June to talk about raising board members’ salaries. The state FOIA Advisory Council issued its formal opinion Thursday, at the request of Prince William Today and InsideNoVa.com, which first reported the topic of the closed meeting. The opinion, signed by Maria J.K. Everett, executive director of the advisory council, said the board’s June 16 closed-session salary discussion was “devoid of personnel considerations” because the board was discussing salary increases generally and not specific employees or individual board members. Therefore, she said, it is “not a proper topic for a closed meeting under the personnel exemption” of the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
InsideNOVA
Read the full text of the opinion

The secret evaluations of the chief executives of Virginia cities and counties often miss one common feature most other Virginians get with their annual reviews: a written report. But the oral evaluations are detailed, in-depth and serious, elected officials who appoint city managers and county administrators say. Hampton, Poquoson and Newport News said their councils' reviews, which all happen behind closed doors, are done orally. The Daily Press filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for any records of the reviews. York, Gloucester and Isle of Wight counties declined to release records of their supervisors' closed-door evaluations of the counties' administrators.
Daily Press

Gov. Terry McAuliffe paid for a state-owned airplane to take him to New York last week to attend a U2 concert where Bill and Hillary Clinton were praised by the band’s lead singer in front of thousands of fans at Madison Square Garden. The trip, which was not mentioned in the governor’s public calendar, highlights his continued close friendship with the Clintons as well as a new pay-your-own-way mentality by Virginia’s elected officials in the wake of a scandal involving McAuliffe’s predecessor. When asked about the trip, by The Associated Press,McAuliffe’s office would say only that the governor went on a state-owned airplane and that he paid for the flight costs himself. But the governor’s staff declined to immediately provide additional details about the trip, including the total cost and who accompanied the governor, saying it was treating those questions as a public records request.
Times-Dispatch

The same month William C. Wampler Jr. left the Virginia Senate after 24 years, he stepped into a job that paid him $450,000 a year to lead the New College Institute and open doors in Richmond for an ambitious plan to build the fledgling higher education center a new home in this hard-hit community. In 3½ years as executive director of the institute, Wampler raised $19.2 million — including $5 million from a state tobacco commission on which he had served — to build and equip a technologically advanced, 52,000-square-foot facility on a neglected block of uptown Martinsville. "He has, without question, delivered what we asked," said Kimble Reynolds Jr., chairman of the New College Foundation, which supplemented Wampler’s $174,000 annual state salary with $276,000 in annual pay and more than $36,000 in housing and other benefits. But Wampler’s compensation has raised eyebrows among General Assembly budget leaders who say they were unaware he had been paid so much to lead a higher education center that this year graduated just 12 students from its degree programs and is trying to reverse a sharp decline in enrollment in the third- and fourth-year degree completion programs that have been its primary mission since its founding on July 1, 2006. "Good grief!" said Sen. Emmett W. Hanger Jr., R-Augusta, a member of the Senate Finance Committee and the board of directors at New College Institute.
Martinsville Bulletin

National Stories

Robert Freeman has been helping people extract public information from New York state agencies for four decades. He is the executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government, a division of the New York Department of State that advises the public on the Freedom of Information Law — the state statute authorizing access to public records. While Freeman gives Gov. Andrew Cuomo credit for making a substantial amount of state data available online, he says the administration has been slower and more difficult than any previous administration in responding to formal Freedom of Information requests. Freeman agreed to participate in a Q&A with ProPublica reporter Joaquin Sapien. In it, Freeman, 68, draws on his experience working under seven different governors to speak to such delays in the release of public information and their underlying causes.
ProPublica

The University of Illinois announced that several administrators violated school policy by using private emails to hide sometimes harsh correspondence from public view. Hundreds of pages of emails released simultaneously include discussions about controlling the damage from a high-profile controversy spurred by the chancellor’s revocation of a job offer to a professor who sent anti-Israel tweets. Chancellor Phyllis Wise resigned earlier this week amid the controversy. Topics of discussion included professor Steven Salaita and his tweets, the hiring of 1970s-era radical James Kilgore and the opening of the Care Illinois College of Medicine. The university said in a statement those emails should have been turned over in a response to a Freedom of Information Request.
Fox News

Editorials/Columns

On Friday, the Daily Press filed a lawsuit against the Virginia Supreme Court's Office of the Executive Secretary, seeking access to a database of hundreds of thousands of court records that track how justice is done in Virginia. We want to explain our reasoning for this action and why we believe it is important to you and the commonwealth of Virginia. It is a bedrock belief of this country that a person's life and liberty can only be infringed by due process, and that those proceedings be conducted in public. When public bodies like the Office of the Executive Secretary creates a record, including an electronic record like a database, Virginia law is clear that it should belong to the public. Elected court clerks are required to keep case records that include such basic information as a defendant's name, the charges and what the judge decided. They include information about when a criminal offense occurred, when a defendant was arrested and whether the original charge was reduced. The OES has a compilation of these records on its website, which allows people to search them one case at a time. But the OES used to release the full database of that case information for public view. The OES claimed the separation of powers meant that the office was not subject to Virginia's Freedom of Information Act and did not need to release the record. It claimed that the OES is not the custodian of the records it maintained through its website and its case management system. That left us at an impasse.
Daily Press

The Virginia Freedom of Information Act is designed to get you the public records that you need and to allow you to attend the meetings of public bodies. This sentence in the preamble is key: “The affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be the beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government.” Law enforcement agencies must release “incident reports” because these reports give the public a broad description of any crime. This is to aid to public safety, among other reasons, so that people may protect themselves against the same crime. Also, the information may prompt someone to call with more information about the perpetrator of the crime. However, law enforcement agencies are not required to release anything more than an incident report about any crime, so investigative files “may” be released or not. And, they may tuck anything into investigative files, including newspaper articles.
Alice Neff Lucan, Crozet Gazette

After withdrawing the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office from accreditation by the Virginia Law Enforcement Standards Commission in July, Sheriff Randy Fisher said it was out of respect. “I have too much respect for the integrity of the program and what it means to agencies that are accredited to allow my agency to be a distraction to the commission,” Fisher said then in a prepared statement. It is a shame Fisher did not have enough respect for the process to fully inform the accrediting agency’s review team of money missing from the department’s evidence room before the department was re-accredited this past March. As reporter Brad Zinn pointed out in Friday’s News Leader, the sheriff had known since late February that money was missing. The three-day assessment didn’t happen until mid-March.
News Leader