Transparency News, 8/16/21

When he was running for mayor in 2016, then-Norfolk Sheriff Bob McCabe handed James Baylor a $12,500 check, according to testimony. The check was from — and signed by — Gerard “Jerry” Boyle, owner of the company that contracted with the city jail to provide inmate medical care. But something was missing: The “pay to the order of” field was blank. Testifying in U.S. District Court Friday, Baylor said McCabe told him Boyle wanted to donate to his mayoral campaign, but he didn’t want his name on it. Baylor said he wrote his name on the “payee” line and deposited it. He and three other friends then wrote their own checks to McCabe’s campaign with that money, he testified.
The Virginian-Pilot

Just as the slate for November’s special election for a Pound Town Council seat was finalized on Friday, another seat will go vacant Aug. 17. Council member Marley Green filed his resignation letter with the town on Friday, citing personal reasons and ongoing controversies facing the council during 2021. Green, an Appalshop employee who was elected in 2020 to a four-year term, is one of four council members who have left since June.  Green, in Friday’s letter, cited difficulty in balancing work, family, volunteerism and council duties. He also pointed to what he called “escalating drama and discord at Town Council” during his term. “The antagonism, distortion of facts, animosity and spite that has been cultivated at council meetings, especially over the last year, makes it agonizingly difficult to make headway on the many serious challenges that Pound is facing,” Green wrote. Since February, the Pound Town Council has fired a town attorney, disbanded its police department and was ordered by the Virginia Attorney General’s Office to turn over the town’s water and sewer system to the Wise County Public Service Authority.
Times News

 

Officials in the Wilson County (North Carolina) town of Lucama are working to recover a decade’s worth of public documents they say were buried in a field outside of town. Some town leaders are suing the town, accusing them of burying the documents to hide a history of racially discriminatory billing practices. Whether or not the town is hiding a dark past, the buried documents pose a security risk, with personal information and even social security numbers clearly visible on the unearthed paper. Local leaders say the effort to recover the documents – and uncover the reason for the burial – is a much-needed step towards accountability in the town.
WRAL

A group of Michigan parents was asked to fork over approximately $400,000 by the Forest Hills Public Schools before the district would comply with a Freedom of Information Act request they had submitted. The district later lowered the cost to about $2,200. The FOIA was sent to FHPS on May 11. The request sought “any and all writings” that used such words as equity, diversity and inclusion. When told responding to such a broad FOIA request could take more than a year to complete at a cost in the $400,000 range, the FOIA was scaled back to read: “Any and all writings since March 1, 2020 through the date of this Request that reference the words or phrase ‘critical race theory’”….
Iosco County News-Herald

editorials & opinion

 

Now, before you accuse me of First World problems and being an entitled so-n-so, hear me out. The issue isn’t that I had to wait. It was annoying, but it wasn’t that long. And it’s not because I was ultimately in the right, though that it is satisfying.  No, the issue is that I had to wait and I had been called out for being wrong, without anyone acknowledging me as a person. They didn’t see me, didn’t hear me. Didn’t recognize why I was even there. Half the implementation of both the records and meetings provisions of the Freedom of Information Act is customer service.
VCOG on Substack

Virtually every day we see headlines across the state, usually at school board meetings where people are yelling — often, yes, literally yelling — about one thing or another. Mask mandates. Transgender policies. Some controversial theory that isn’t even being taught in Virginia schools anyway, yet people are yelling about it. Our point today is not to debate the wisdom, or lack thereof, of all these policies. Rather it’s to ask a different question: When did we start behaving so poorly? Feeling passionately about some matter of public policy is quite fine. However, feeling passionately about something is not the same as the behavior we’re seeing at some of these school board meetings.
The Roanoke Times