Transparency News 8/3/17

Thursday, August 3, 2017



State and Local Stories

A Henrico County Circuit Court judge on Wednesday reversed a ruling he issued in June, saying he made a mistake when he wrote that Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act applied only to public bodies and not to individual officials. Judge James S. Yoffy announced the reversal at the request of a Loudoun County resident, Brian C. Davison. He had filed paperwork in court arguing that state Sen. Siobhan S. Dunnavant, R-Henrico, violated FOIA by not responding to a request he made in January within the five-day window required by law, and by not turning over records he asked for from her Facebook page. After announcing his decision, the judge presided over a hearing lasting more than half the day about whether Dunnavant violated FOIA. He ruled that she did not.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

A judge on Wednesday threw out a defamation case that Hanover County Supervisor Sean Davis had brought against Style Weekly. Michael Levy, a Stafford County Circuit Court judge who heard the case in Hanover Circuit Court, granted the Richmond-based alternative newspaper’s motion to throw out the case before sending it to a jury for deliberation. Levy said that, as a public official, Davis faced a higher threshold for proving he had been defamed. “You’re required to have a thicker skin,” Levy said of public officials. “We have a system, I believe, in place in America where a jury should decide,” Davis said. “I think the judge is probably a fine adjudicator, but in today’s climate with the media being what it is, it’s a very, very tough fight.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

At a special meeting held Monday night, Hopewell City Council voted to publicly advertise the position of city manager, a role that will become empty Sept. 1 when the present city manager, Mark Haley, retires. The decision came on the heels of two other Council votes to not appoint Assistant City Manager Charles Dane to the job but to make him interim city manager once Haley departs. Overall, however, Council struggled to discuss the decision of whether to appoint Dane or advertise the position because prior discussions on the issue had taken place in closed session. “We started this conversation in June,” Gore said. “In June there was a majority to advertise. We are now in July, at the end of July. Those that wanted to advertise have waited for this special meeting so that everyone could be together to talk about the issues,” she said. “We talked about the issues and we came out with the understanding that although we may not agree on the appointment and the advertising, that we weren’t going to try to do anything else.” Denton pushed back, saying, “She and I must have been in a different meeting, because what I recall in closed session was that we didn’t agree.”  Ward 3 Councilor Tony Zevgolis caught fire from residents Monday over an early attempt to remove communications from citizens from the agenda, which he claimed had “never been done” in a special meeting. Despite his protest, however, Council not only permitted residents to speak but also waived its rule prohibiting them from speaking about matters on the agenda.
Progress-Index

White activist Jason Kessler’s Unite the Right rally planned for August 12 in Emancipation Park will happen, for now. Charlottesville City Council sat behind closed doors for hours Wednesday looking at options to stop the event which is expected to draw thousands. The city says it had to carefully craft a release about what happened at council's private meeting, but in the end, council says there’s nothing it can do at this point to stop the rally.
NBC29

Earlier this year, state Sen. Louise Lucas did what would generally be viewed as opposition research on a political ally. She asked city staff to pull travel and training expenditures for the office of Commonwealth's Attorney Stephanie Morales. But when Lucas later announced she and two other prominent Democrats were no longer backing Morales in her first re-election bid, the matriarch of Portsmouth politics didn't mention the request or her findings. So was there anything unusual about Morales' travel? A review by The Virginian-Pilot of the documents turned over to Lucas, as well as additional research, found that Morales took more out-of-state trips than any other top prosecutor in South Hampton Roads and that a friend from the office joined her on more than half of them. According to the 675-page stack of documents the city provided Lucas and later The Pilot in response to a separate Freedom of Information Act request, Morales personally took at least 17 work trips.
Virginian-Pilot

State auditors will review the Virginia Department of Elections after a series of technical problems that have raised questions about the reliability of the software that powers the state’s voter system. Last month, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission approved a resolution instructing its staff to conduct an in-depth review of the elections agency, which hasn’t been fully studied in almost 20 years. During that span, the agency implemented VERIS, the information system that local elections officials say has been spotty and slow. The IT problems have mostly meant headaches for the registrars who use the system.
Roanoke Times