Transparency News 9/7/17

Thursday, September 7, 2017

State and Local Stories

The Abingdon Town Council will consider creating a citizen board at an upcoming work session to focus on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that the Town receives. At Tuesday’s Town Council meeting, Councilwoman Cindy Patterson proposed that a citizen board be created to review how the Town handles its FOIA requests by making government information available to citizens. She recommended the council consider the proposal during the mid-monthly work session on Nov. 15. “The intent is to have transparency in Abingdon,” Patterson said. “We can either operate as a secretive town and pick and choose what we give to the public or we can keep the citizens informed and give them as much information as possible.” 
Herald Courier

Richmond has been flagged by Virginia’s new system for catching early signs of fiscal distress in local governments, but that’s not necessarily evidence of financial danger. The city was among the localities noted — but not publicly identified — by Auditor of Public Accounts Martha S. Mavredes last month as falling below the warning threshold of a new system designed to assess a locality’s financial practices. The Virginia Association of Counties confirmed that Richmond County, on the Northern Neck, and Page County, in the northern Shenandoah Valley, were two of the localities the system flagged.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

National Stories
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On Tuesday, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a coalition of 17 media organizations submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of National Veterans Legal Services Program v. United States of America. The brief argues that the law requires the judicial system to limit the fees it charges people to access its Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system to the cost of disseminating the information requested. Currently, many members of the media face prohibitive costs when trying to obtain court records to inform the public about what is happening in the judicial system. “The government should not be able to set the price of court records so high that the press – and therefore the public – are priced out of accessing information about how courts are acting on behalf of their communities,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

The Kanawha County Prosecutor’s Office has dropped a criminal charge against a reporter arrested in May after “yelling” questions at Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in the West Virginia State Capitol. Dan Heyman, a correspondent with the Public News Service, based in Charleston, W.Va., was briefly jailed and charged with “willful disruption of governmental processes” after trying to question Price, who was at the Capitol as part of a listening tour on the opioid epidemic. On Wednesday the prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement with Heyman’s legal team that while his conduct “may have been aggressive journalism” it “was not unlawful and did not violate the law with which he was charged, that is, willfully disrupting a State governmental process or meeting.”
NPR

Editorials/Columns


Lost in the Labor Day weekend news about North Korea and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was a dismaying new poll released by VCU. It showed how much the campaign against fundamental liberties has made inroads among the general public. Conducted by the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, the poll shows that half of Virginians think colleges and universities should place more emphasis on protecting people from discrimination, even if that infringes on the right to free expression.
Richmond Times-Dispatch