Transparency News 8/8/16

 

The June 6 email from an assistant vice president at the University of Virginia to two other administrators seems clear. In a summary of what was expected to happen at the June Board of Visitors meeting a few days later, it said the rector would give a report: “EXECUTIVE SESSION: Bill Goodwin to give overview on Strategic Investment Fund.” Board members received similar information in an email a few days earlier: “In preparation for the discussion in Executive Session on June 10, please review the attached background materials on the Strategic Investment Fund.” So how did the board go into closed session? The board’s motion to close the meeting said it would be discussing “specific university faculty” and also “matters requiring the provision of legal advice where discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the negotiating posture of the university.” Personnel and legal issues are two discretionary exemptions to the open-meeting law.
Virginian-Pilot

A former member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors is challenging the legality of a closed-door meeting at which members discussed the school’s $2.3 billion Strategic Investment Fund. Former board member Helen E. Dragas of Virginia Beach also has raised questions about the creation of such a large pool of money, which she calls a “slush fund.”
Daily Progress

Two allegations that Newport News Vice Mayor Tina Vick violated conflict of interest and campaign finance reporting laws — one a misdemeanor and the other subject to a $100 fine — are what a special prosecutor appointed last week is charged with examining. The special prosecutor, Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney Gregory Underwood, is conducting a legal review of the two allegations, spokeswoman Amanda Howie said. Vick has still not been told what the special prosecutor is looking into.
Daily Press

During this year’s Norfolk mayoral campaign, candidate Andy Protogyrou’s law firm went to court to accuse a rival, Sheriff Bob McCabe, of withholding public records about McCabe’s office. Now, months after both men lost the election, the lawsuit will be dropped without a judge issuing a ruling. “From our perspective, the matter ended when the election ended, and the documents were never produced,” Protogyrou said last week. “With them never being produced, they couldn’t be used in the campaign.” McCabe said the result proves what he said all along: that the court filing was simply a smear job. “I think, by everyone’s account, it was written more for the newspaper than it was for a court of law,” McCabe said.
Virginian-Pilot

While Halifax County Public School coaches received good news Tuesday evening, it didn’t come without a few hiccups and confusion throughout the night and only after a two-hour closed-door session that has raised some questions. The night began with board members unsure whether they could add citizen comments to the agenda of the special called meeting. Parliamentarian Nick Long explained to the board they needed a super majority instead of a simple majority for this action to take place, and that required six out of eight votes. More than one board member argued they would only need five, but Long held firm explaining a two-thirds majority, six out of eight votes, would be required. Acting on a motion by ED-6 Trustee Fay Satterfield, the board unanimously approved adding citizen comments to the agenda prior to going behind closed doors. The board then went behind closed doors for two hours to discuss personnel, or as Chair Kim Farson explained at the beginning of the meeting “to discuss individuals and their salaries.” Due to the length of the session, some citizens began to question, “What is taking so long?”
Gazette Virginian



National Stories
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Thanks to the Texas Supreme Court, McAllen taxpayers cannot find out how much their city paid Enrique Iglesias to belt out his Latin pop lyrics at a holiday parade. And Houston cannot release, among other information, how many driver permits it has issued to ride-hailing giant Uber. A Kaufman County school district’s food service deal? Much of that is now secret, as are details of a Texas Department of Insurance contract for interpretation services. Those are a few instances among many over the past year in which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office told local governments not to release information to the public because it is now shielded by a state Supreme Court ruling protecting the secrets of private companies doing business with government agencies.
Texas Tribune

"A lot of people think I'm nuts to pursue this." The speaker is a self-described Dallas stay-at-home mom who spent $100,000 in legal fees to expose a culture of corruption in the U.S. Secret Service. She filed 89 Freedom of Information Acts (89!) and discovered enough Secret Service scandals and cover-ups that even Bob Woodward would be impressed. For this, she got very little public attention. Until now. Meet Malia Litman. When the first Secret Service sex scandals broke a few years ago, she grew curious. A former senior partner at Thompson & Knight law firm in Dallas, she knew that federal law allows us to see government documents. She began filing requests with the U.S. Department Homeland Security to learn of any incidents of agent misbehavior in the Secret Service, any investigations and disciplinary action. I'll skip ahead to the end of her multi-year legal battle that ensued. She won. In the end, she received 3,914 pages, some of them so hot they almost burn the fingers.
Dallas Morning News

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane will go on trial on Monday on charges that she illegally leaked grand jury information to embarrass a rival, closing out a four-year term dominated by a web of allegations that have roiled the state government.
Reuters

A judge in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island began hearings Wednesday in a lawsuit against the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, spurred by a local journalist. Providence-based writer Phil Eil, says he’s fought for more than five years to obtain access to thousands of pages of public evidence from a pill-mill trial, about which he plans to write a book.
Rhode Island Public Radio

The national decline in trials, both criminal and civil, has been noted in law journal articles, bar association studies and judicial opinions. But recently, in the two federal courthouses in Manhattan and a third in White Plains (known collectively as the Southern District of New York), the vanishing of criminal jury trials has never seemed so pronounced. The Southern District held only 50 criminal jury trials last year, the lowest since 2004, according to data provided by the court. The pace remains slow this year. “It’s hugely disappointing,” said Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a 20-year veteran of the Manhattan federal bench. “A trial is the one place where the system really gets tested. Everything else is done behind closed doors.”
New York Times

Editorials/Columns

Why are the actions of Pittsylvania County’s Agricultural Development Board on the evening of April 8, 2015, still being discussed in a court of law? On June 23, 2015, General District Court Judge Larry J. Palmer dismissed a petition against the ag board because it had developed a “corrective action plan”—the legal equivalent of “… go, and sin no more.” We’re still talking about the case, because we’re still learning about how the Pittsylvania County Agricultural Development Board handles state law —specifically, the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Given the importance of this group of concerned citizens, their meetings should be open—following both the letter and the spirit of Virginia law. Just so there’s no confusion about what’s happening at those meetings, someone should be taking the minutes.
Register & Bee

To say that officials with the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth have behaved atrociously in the matter of Jamycheal Mitchell barely scratches the surface. Jail Superintendent David Simons rebuffed a Freedom of Information Act request for video taken outside Mitchell’s cell, claiming there was none. He told a lawyer for the Mitchell family the same thing. Supposedly, the video was overwritten — even though the family’s lawyer asked that it be preserved. Now it turns out the video might have been preserved — yet jail officials still refuse to hand it over. Simons says he is allowed to withhold it. That doesn’t mean he has to, and it certainly doesn’t make doing so a good idea. Jail officials claim in a legal filing to have emailed this newspaper correcting their previous statement on that point, but now confess they never sent any such email. This is pathetic and inexcusable.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

June 10 was a bittersweet day for Virginia Beach businesswoman Helen Dragas. She’d attended her final meeting of the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia. Her turbulent eight-year tenure on the board had come to an end. Ultimately, it was Dragas’ determination to contain college costs that would lead her to expose what had taken place behind closed doors in Charlottesville on June 10. In the course of several interviews over the past two weeks, Dragas told me that two things about that meeting troubled her. Dragas worried that the board had conducted an improper executive session (she’d questioned the move, she said, and been told it was proper) and she’d been dismayed about a closed discussion of a recently authorized investment fund that had ballooned to $2.3 billion. Dragas had a choice. She could simply walk away and resume private life. Or she could go public, embarrass her former colleagues and risk reviving some of the opprobrium that had rained down on her during the failed removal of the president. “I felt the public had a right and a need to know” about the fund, Dragas explained. “Especially considering the increases in tuition. “Maybe I drank too much of the honor-system Kool-Aid,” she said dryly.
Kerry Dougherty, Virginian-Pilot

IN NOVEMBER, The Virginian-Pilot reported that an anonymous internet publication claimed public officials were secretly members of the Ku Klux Klan. The unsubstantiated claim was quickly refuted, but not before a venomous rumor was unleashed on social media and personal threats were directed at the officials. For every terrible failure, however, there are examples where social media provided accurate information unavailable from other sources that led to greater justice or safety. Take the recent three-day police standoff in my neighborhood near Old Dominion University.
James Toscano, Virginian-Pilot