Transparency News 9/17/14
State and Local Stories
It wasn’t a long meeting, so it should take but a minute or two toread the tweets from yesterday’s FOIA Council meeting.
VCOG on Storify
And for a more comprehensive wrap-up:
Open Virginia Law
The final legal chapter in the scandal over a no-show Community Services Board worker has ended. A deputy city attorney said Tuesday that a settlement had been reached in a defamation lawsuit filed by four former employees of the CSB against the agency's former director. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Deputy City Attorney Jack Cloud, who announced the settlement in an emailed statement, did not return calls. "The parties and their counsel agree that the matter is closed and will not be making any further comments," Cloud said.
Virginian-Pilot
The Virginia Lottery racked up record-setting sales last fiscal year and is now expected to generate more this year than originally projected — a rare upbeat note in the budget-cutting plan rolled out by state leaders Monday. The data is broken down by top sellers, locality and individual stores in the Lynchburg region for both FY14 and FY13. To sort it or create your own calculations, click the toolbar button marked "Edit in Browser."
News & Advance (with link to online spreadsheet)
National Stories
During his final year in Congress in 2008, then-senator Joe Biden heralded his top picks for the nation's elite service academies with a congratulatory news release and led a group of academy-bound students on a personal tour of his domain as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman. As vice president, Biden has the power to nominate students to three of the nation's service academies. However, the names of the students he chooses for these plum assignments are now secret. Neither Biden's staff nor the academies would disclose the identities of his nominees to USA TODAY, citing student privacy. So it's unclear how the vice president uses his nominations — which this year included the daughter of a congressman and an Air Force Academy nominee his office took an interest in.USA Today
A California judge issued a temporary restraining order Tuesday that prohibits Pasadena officials from releasing the results of an independent consultant’s investigation into the 2012 fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant granted a request by the Pasadena Police Officers Assn. to issue the order pending a future decision on how much of the report should be disclosed under the law. “I am not going to disclose it until I decide the merits,” the judge told lawyers for the city, the police union, a group of Pasadena organizations and the Los Angeles Times. “There is one chance to prevent the bell being rung.”
Los Angeles Times
The next Edward Snowden may find it more difficult to leak government secrets. The Pentagonplans to issue new rules in the coming months requiring certain contractors that work with classified government networks to monitor what employees are doing in those systems. Information about employees’ browsing on those networks will be combined with data analysis tools to spot suspicious behavior such as a Middle East analyst rooting around in intelligence documents related to China or Russia or an employee accessing documents at unusual hours. The new monitoring regime is designed to give contractors early warnings that one of their employees may be stealing classified information either to leak it to the public as Snowden and Pvt. Chelsea Manning did or to pass it to a foreign government.
Politico
Editorials/Columns
Gov. Terry McAuliffe and House Appropriations Committee Chairman S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, reportedly spoke privately by phone to close a $2.4 billion shortfall in the state budget. The two agreed to spare K-12 education spending and an economic development fund while using reserve funds and a 3 percent across-the-board cut to balance the budget. This being Virginia, we're not even shocked. But as alarming as backroom negotiations over a public budget are — and they most assuredly are — we have to wonder how a spending plan passed only months earlier proved to be so inaccurate. How did revenue forecasts so wildly miss the mark?Daily Press
Byron Marshall’s mysterious departure as Richmond’s chief administrative officer serves as a metaphor for Richmond’s government generally and for the stadium proposed for Shockoe Bottom more specifically. Insiders may not know what is going on; the citizenry does not have a clue.Members of Richmond’s City Council did not learn the details in an open session, either. They signed confidentiality statements before receiving a briefing. Reva Trammel declined to sign away her right to keep her constituents informed of city business. She made the proper call, which is an assertion we seldom make. The council as a whole should have risen against this abuse of power.
Times-Dispatch
Sadly, the latest revelations in the case of Charlottesville’s voter registrar show an additional lapse. For years, Sheri Iachetta had allowed the city to pay for cellphones for two former associates, long after they no longer were part of the registrar’s office. One of those associates was her husband. New information contradicts her previous statement on that particular phone. Initially, she indicated she regularly had been paying for her husband’s phone out of her own pocket. We now know that is not true. Records show she reimbursed the city for that cellphone usage only last month.
Daily Progress
Why the lack of participation? At least on the state level, a study from the College of William and Mary points to how the districts are set up. First, it’s not as easy for Virginia lawmakers to attract a large number of voters, who usually turn out only for Presidential campaigns and then vote all the way down the ticket. Virginia selects its General Assembly members normally in “off years,” when there’s no big Presidential or Congressional races to draw people out. And without some type of motivation, people here in the Valley stay home in large numbers. In a city with 12,256 voters, Waynesboro recorded one of the lowest turnouts in history this May, with just 2.9 percent or 356 people coming out to the polls. For some would be politicians, it’s hard to get motivated with such a small turnout. Second, some politicians complain that the legislative redistricting, which decides who can vote for which race, generally makes things easier for the incumbent. The problem with all that is by not voting or not entering a race, people turn the power over to others.
News Virginian
