|
Current Headlines
|
VPA editorials |
|
|
VPAEditorial for House Bill 407 / Senate Bill 130
A Moment of Clarity
The work of the General Assembly often descends into a sort of numb rush, as subcommittee chairs hustle bills through like fast-moving trains. Explanations are given, objections are made, amendments are tacked on, all in perfunctory fashion.
So it was notable last week when Delegate Terrie Suit of Virginia Beach slowed the subcommittee train long enough to nail the University of Virginia to the wall with a few direct and thoughtful questions. The University is seeking to amend Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act so that it will not have to identify donors who seek to remain anonymous. The request seems innocent enough in this privacy-obsessed age. But Delegate Suit brought the discussion back to first principles.
Is it possible, she queried, for a donor to the University to give anonymously under current law? The University’s representative danced around the issue, but it ultimately became clear that the answer is “yes.” Several years ago the University won that battle, over the objection of public access advocates, by excluding University-affiliated foundations (currently 26 in number) from the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Anyone who wishes to shower largesse upon the University anonymously may give to one of many 501(c) foundations, whose funds now number in the billions of dollars.
This year’s debate is over the public operations of the University, which are presumed to operate under the same open-government rules that apply to all public bodies. The University wants to give donors to the public side the same secrecy available to those who give to a foundation.
How do we know, asked Delegate Suit, when a vendor who gets a big contract from the University coincidentally happens to be a big donor? Under current law, it’s already too late to find out, as long as the donor gives to a foundation. If HB 407 or its companion bill, SB 130, pass, that same secrecy will apply to gifts made directly to the public part of the University, and the simple answer to the Delegate’s question will be “you can’t know if the donor doesn’twant you to know.”
Year after year, the largest donor to the University of Virginia is the taxpayers of Virginia. The General Assembly sends over $150 million of their dollars annually to Charlottesville to support the University’s operations. Increasingly, even that huge sum is dwarfed by the massive infusion of Private money from operations, investments and gifts that fuel a $2 billion University budget. However, as long as the University wishes to maintain the fiction that it is public, it should consider transparency of the public side of its operations a reasonable quid pro quo for that taxpayer support.
Delegate Suit hit the nail on the head, and we support every effort that she and her colleagues can exert to keep the identities of donors to all public bodies, including the University, in the open.
Underground Operations
Day and night, as Virginians go about their business, streams of information about some of them are being gathered and analyzed in the basement of Virginia State Police headquarters in Richmond. The VSP operates a Fusion Intelligence Center, like similar centers housed in other states, that constantly shares information culled from local, state, federal and international sources. It is staffed by state, local and federal employees.
The concept is not new. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, retired Admiral John Poindexter touted the concept of Total Information Awareness – that we should mine data about our citizens from every possible source in order to preempt terrorist activity. His more extreme proposals were met with revulsion by a large segment of the public because they came too close to the sort of totalitarian nightmare we were taught to fear as children. Secret surveillance of the citizenry happened in old-style Soviet-bloc countries, in Communist China, and Saddam’s Iraq, but not here.
Well, Poindexter’s vision lives on, as a bill introduced by Delegate Dwight Jones reveals. The legislation, ironically numbered House Bill 1007, massively strengthens the hand of the Fusion Intelligence Center, and raises disturbing questions. Although the stated purpose of the legislation is to give federal agencies the assurance that secret information they share with the Virginia Fusion Intelligence Center will not be disclosed, the bill goes far beyond that.
First, the bill makes confidential all information housed at the Fusion Intelligence Center, including not only terrorism leads but “criminal intelligence information,” a term so gauzily defined in HB 1007 that it literally means anything the government wants it to mean. For decades, the State Police and other law-enforcement officials operated successfully under broad exclusions from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Now the law-enforcement community, having conflated the preemption of terrorists with the preemption of crime in general, wants to remove this vaguely defined cache of “criminal intelligence information,” held by the VSP from any application of FOIA.
Second, the bill makes employees of the Center immune from subpoena. If you are charged by the State with a crime, and the charge is based on intelligence shoddily assembled by the Fusion Intelligence Center, your lawyer will never be able to cross-examine the people who collected and
analyzed that information in a court of law.
Third, the bill encourages snitching of the worst kind. Anyone who wants to accuse a neighbor, or to curry favor with the government, is not discouraged from making false or malicious charges against you. HB 1007 gives him immunity from your lawsuit for defamation, invasion of privacy or
negligence.
To question HB 1007 will elicit the predictable red-faced, tub-thumping of politicians who have profitably, albeit cynically, mined the rich vein of “learning the lessons of 9-11.” Before they run that game on us again, get a copy of HB 1007 and read it. And say hello to Big Brother.
|
|
|
First time for everything! |
|
|
Link to Star Exponent story
Judge: Madison sheriff violated FOIA law
Experts say case could set precedent on punishment for elected officials
Rob Humphreys
Managing editor
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Madison County Sheriff Erik J. Weaver must pay a $250 fine and the plaintiff’s court fees for willfully violating the state’s Freedom of Information Act, a judge ruled Tuesday in Madison County General District Court.
Experts are calling it a potentially precedent-setting case regarding how public officials are punished for failing to comply with open records requests.
Leigh Purdum, a former office employee under Weaver, brought suit when the sheriff refused to identify the people he had appointed to a newly formed citizens advisory board.
Purdum also sought other information about the board, including its meeting dates, the criteria for choosing members, topics of discussion, goals and objectives, and copies of previous minutes.
After Tuesday’s ruling from Judge Robert H. Downer Jr., specially appointed from Albemarle County, Weaver produced the names of the 13 board members.
Maria J.K. Everett, executive director of the state-run Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council, believes this is the first time a judge in district court has ruled an elected official willfully violated Virginia FOIA laws.
Everett, who has served in her position since the office was created in July 2000, called the ruling “pretty significant.”
Jennifer Perkins, executive director of the Warrenton-based Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said it’s “a huge step in the right direction.” She said similar cases have always resulted in no monetary punishment.
“It’s a statement,” Perkins said. “The thing we’ve been really frustrated with is (judges’) reluctance to find willful violations when it’s clear to everyone else. … What’s great in this case is that you actually got the punishment.”
Perkins said the state’s FOIA law is “a little confusing when it comes to constitutional officers” such as sheriffs. “While they’re covered by FOIA, she said, not everything they create by FOIA is.”
Because of what Perkins deems a loophole in state FOIA law, “Citizens advisory committees don’t have to follow open meetings laws.”
“But,” she continued, “they should have to follow open records laws as far as what (information) the sheriff holds.”
Weaver must pay the money personally. It will go into a state-run literary fund.
Weaver’s stance
Reached by phone Wednesday, Weaver described Purdum’s case as a personal attack veiled in a FOIA request from a “former disgruntled employee.”
Purdum acknowledged that “this man hates my guts.”
Weaver, who begins his second term in January, won election in November after a bitter race against Dave Allen. He said Purdum had an ulterior motive for wanting to know his appointees to the citizens advisory panel.
“People that were supporting me,” Weaver said, “she was attacking them” through letters and phone calls.
Weaver said he had received extensive legal counsel on the matter ever since Purdum began filing FOIA requests in June. According to Weaver, his attorney - who he would not identify - gave him “incorrect information” and has since been removed from the case. Colt Puryear represented Weaver Tuesday in court.
Weaver said the case, which he might appeal, is “taking me away from the citizens of Madison County. It’s starting to cause the taxpayers money and time in court.”
Background
Purdum, who represented herself and accrued $53 in court costs, said she couldn’t afford a lawyer and nobody locally was interested in taking the case.
She said she filed the suit because “I wanted to know who was my representative” on the sheriff’s advisory board. “After I hit dead ends with the sheriff and Lisa Kelley (the county administrator), I wrote a letter to the FOIA council in Richmond and they issued that opinion.”
The opinion, a three-page document signed by Everett Oct. 11, examined specific issues surrounding whether the sheriff’s citizens advisory panel fell under open government regulations. Everett’s written opinion, which addressed several aspects of the law and previous court rulings, presented information that supported arguments from both sides.
It concluded that “while the Citziens’ Advisory Committee created by the Sheriff is not a public body and is not required to hold public meetings, it may be beneficial to do so in the interest of positive public relations and public participation.”
Everett added that “to the extent to which the Sheriff has notes or minutes regarding the Committee, those are public records subject to disclosure.”
Purdum used Everett’s opinion in court, and Judge Downer’s ruling essentially supported those findings.
Purdum, 50, said she worked as a sergeant with the Fairfax County Police before taking a job with the Madison County Sheriff’s Office in January 2003. She quit in April 2004 after what she and Weaver summarized as a personality dispute.
Purdum said she now works part-time as a national law enforcement trainer on missing children issues.
Rob Humphreys can be reached at 825-0771 ext. 128 or
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
Quote of the week |
|
|
FOIA cases spotlight law, modern technology
Local
By Shannon Sollinger
Source: Loudoun Times-Mirror: http://www.loudountimes.com/news/2007/oct/31/foia-cases-spotlight-law-modern-technology/
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31 2007
District Court Judge Dean Worcester has not yet ruled on Sally Mann's Freedom of Information Act request to see all e-mails to and from seven individuals and Supervisor Lori Waters (R-Broad Run), including those on her home computer and personal accounts.
But "it does not meet the purpose of FOIA that the official can decide what is public or private," Worcester said Oct. 26 at the conclusion of testimony.
This case and two other similar ones could be headed for the Virginia Supreme Court.
Worcester ruled in favor of openness in two cases earlier this month, and ordered Board Chairman Scott York (I) and Jim Burton (I-Blue Ridge) to turn over materials from their home computers to Mann. Both cases have been appealed to the Circuit Court, and Mann has filed an emergency injunction to be allowed to see all the e-mails without waiting for the court case to unfold.
Technology, Worcester said, has far outstripped the law, and it may be time for the General Assembly to bring the law into the modern era of multiple e-mail accounts and wireless e-mail phones. Waters, he said, may leave the office, but the office follows her everywhere.
Mann said she seeks information on communications to and from York, Burton and Waters, and opponents of Mann's application to develop land she owns on Route 704 just south of Hamilton. In court Oct. 26, she said she wants to know the relationship between Waters and Jeff Wolinski.
Wolinksi, she charged, is probably the Loudoun Insider blogger on the Too Conservative Web site. As Loudoun Insider, she charged, he has opposed her land-use application and disparaged her personally. She wants to know what, if anything, he has said to Waters and other supervisors.
A recent posting on Too Conservative reads, "Under threat of legal action I have removed all references to a certain woman. Please refrain from talking about you know who."
Loudoun Insider responds, "I disagree ... but will respect his wishes. ... Check comments for more, including Firetti threatening to sue Lori Waters."
Waters said later that Mike Firetti, the Republican running against York for the at-large seat on the Board of Supervisors, had threatened her at a recent campaign forum at River Creek Country Club. "I told him I would not talk to him without a witness present. He came back, pointed a finger at me, and said, 'We're going to sue you and sue you and keep suing you until we expose you.' "
Firetti denied the account, saying he had asked Waters if she would support him in the race. "She refused," Firetti said.
Leesburg Supervisor Jim Clem, also running, confirmed he was standing next to Waters and Firetti. He said he heard an exchange but "couldn't tell what the conversation was about."
Mann charged in court that Waters withheld some e-mails from her home computer, which may have been to or from Wolinski, and redacted, or inked out, portions of others.
Waters replied, under oath, "I have provided everything that had anything to do with anything we might vote on at the Board of Supervisors. ... Personal e-mails are not subject to FOIA."
Assistant County Attorney Milissa Spring argued that FOIA deals with public records, not private business. "Just because Mrs. Waters is a public official doesn't mean she doesn't have a private life. When Lori Waters is doing Lori Waters' business, dealing with friends or her campaign, it is not subject to disclosure."
Mann's FOIA request, Spring concluded, "is politically motivated."
Mann concluded, "I want to know their [Waters and Wolinski] relationship. What are the e-mails she would not give me. The law says she has to turn over all the documents, or say why not."
The law, said Spring, does not cover personal documents.
Someone, Worcester said, will have to decide.
Del. Joe May (R-western Loudoun) agreed that the General Assembly will have to revisit the FOIA legislation to close the gap between the original law and modern communication technology. May chairs the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, which has addressed similar problems with computer theft and hacking.
Waters said the law cannot be used to force her to turn over campaign e-mails. If that is the ruling, she said, she will probably appeal.
"This is not about public records. I think Mrs. Mann is using FOIA to seek revenge because I did not vote for her land-use application. "
Wolinksi, she said, does not live in her district but has supported her campaign, as have numerous individuals all over the county.
Contact the reporter at
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
|
Salem council recesses regular meeting, resumes meeting at W.Va. resort |
|
|
Roanoke Times, Sunday, October 20, 2007
Salem council meets in W.Va.
The council members attended a three-day retreat to address long-term concerns.
By Marquita Brown
777-3521
Salem residents might be surprised to learn that their city council recently recessed a meeting, only to resume it four days later at a golf, spa and ski resort in West Virginia.
For three days, at the request of City Manager Forest Jones, council members joined a retreat for high-ranking city staff at the Resort at Glade Springs in Daniels, W.Va. Some of them brought their spouses to the resort, which is about a two-hour drive from Salem.
During the retreat, council members spent a few hours a day discussing issues including the city's long-term goals, capital improvement plans and other concerns. Jones and some council members noted that no actions were taken during the meetings.
Because all of the council members attended the retreat and discussed city business, it was subject to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, a state law designed to encourage open government.
Among other things, the law requires that all meetings of public bodies be open and that public notice of those meetings be made in several ways, including online.
The act of recessing a previously scheduled public meeting in Salem and continuing it four days later in West Virginia allowed the council to legally forgo specific public notice of the retreat, one FOIA expert said.
"I can see where local newspaper reporters and citizens may go, 'You did that?' " said Maria Everett, executive director of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council.
But, Everett said of the council, "They didn't do anything wrong."
Salem planning director and spokeswoman Melinda Payne said: "We don't intend to hide anything, and that's not what we tried to do."
The notice council gave of the retreat came late in its meeting the night of Sept. 24 in Salem City Hall.
Councilman Chris Clemens made a motion to recess and continue the meeting on Sept. 28 in Daniels. Clemens' motion followed a public hearing on the construction and operation of a concrete batch plant off Kesler Mill Road -- after many people in council chambers had left the room. But Payne said some residents were still present.
"We don't have any control over how many people are in the room," Mayor Howard Packett said.
Planning for the retreat, held annually for the city's department leaders and constitutional officers, began in February. Jones said he doesn't remember when he asked individual council members to attend, but it was much later and an afterthought.
"I don't get a chance to talk to them a lot as a group," Jones said of the council members. The retreat provided an opportunity for an informal meeting without everyday distractions, he said.
The intent, Jones said, was also to ensure that the city officials and council members, three of whom are relatively new, received the same information on issues concerning the city. The goal was more urgent because the retreat is the last Jones will attend before retiring in 2008.
At this point, it's unclear how much the retreat will cost city taxpayers. Finance Director Frank Turk said he doesn't yet have a bill from the resort.
In February, before Jones had invited the council members, a representative from the Resort at Glade Springs estimated reservations for a 40-person retreat would cost $9,160. The estimate was the lowest of six the city received from other hotels and resorts.
The estimated costs included hotel rooms, breakfast and lunch each day and meeting space.
The estimate did not include the costs for five council members, or for nightly group dinners, or a pre-dinner reception on Sept. 28. Those charges will be billed to the city.
Nor did it include resort fees, use of the golf courses or other available activities. Those attending the retreat paid for entertainment on their own or gathered in the common areas of their lodges, Payne said.
Jones said his wife and the wives of Packett and Vice Mayor John Givens also attended the retreat. The women incurred small expenses for lunch and dinner, Payne said. After The Roanoke Times raised questions about the retreat, Jones said he paid for his wife's expenses and later said Packett and Givens would do the same.
During the Sept. 28-30 leg of the retreat in which the council participated, council members spent three to four hours each day discussing city business, according to minutes of the meetings. Council members used that time to address concerns they have fielded from their constituents, such as recycling in Salem, Payne said.
On Sept. 30, the council went into closed session to discuss a personnel matter, according to the minutes.
Payne, Jones, Packett and Councilman Randy Foley all said the meetings were informal and informational, with no votes or actions taken.
Givens declined to comment on the matter, referring questions to Jones. Council members Clemens and Jane Johnson did not return calls seeking comment.
Salem officials acknowledge that in the past the city government has been characterized as inaccessible. Jones said he has been working to change that perception since becoming city manager in 2000.
Among efforts to keep residents informed are the publication of a magazine that is distributed quarterly, Payne said. Each month Jones meets with Salem business owners to discuss upcoming city projects and other matters.
Salem has also formed task forces of residents, city officials and, in some cases, students and leaders from Roanoke College to address concerns, Payne said.
And, Everett said, the way the council announced its retreat may be unusual, but it's not unprecedented.
Everett said she has heard of one Virginia county council that legally continued a meeting in Boston.
"To me, the better idea is trying to appear open as well as doing what the letter of the law requires," Everett said. "They're under no legal obligation to do so."
|
|
|
DGIF officials indicted: Virginian-Pilot editorial |
|
|
Good old boys and good government
The Virginian-Pilot
© September 22, 2007
The indictments handed down this week against three former officials at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries ought to reassure Virginians that the good old boys no longer rule state government.
Unfortunately, many Virginians will conclude that exactly the opposite is true. Attorney General Bob McDonnell has himself to blame for the cloud that remains over his office's investigation of the agency.
The former department director and two wardens have paid a heavy price for using $10,000 in public funds to lavishly outfit themselves for an African safari. First they lost their jobs; now they face prison time.
Dan Hoffler, the former board chairman who inspired the romp around Zimbabwe and South Africa, was spared. He did nothing illegal, but because of his connections, the suspicion lingers, right or wrong, that he caught a break.
When state officials questioned the merit and propriety of the safari, Hoffler tried to snuff the controversy by writing a check to cover expenses. McDonnell's office concluded that refunds don't absolve such grand extravagance. That's pretty tough, but not tough enough to erase inescapable doubts that this investigation was handled on the up and up.
Hoffler gave McDonnell $25,000 in campaign donations in late 2005, months after a blistering audit had been turned over to law enforcement. By keeping the money, McDonnell kept the taint that came with it.
McDonnell is hardly the only well-placed Virginian to get a generous check from Hoffler. He's been a big contributor to Gov. Tim Kaine, former Gov. Mark Warner and former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore.
McDonnell did some things right. He recused himself, then placed his top deputy, William Mims, in charge. Mims is a former state senator who is well respected around Capitol Square for handling tricky issues. Incidentally, he's never gotten a dime from Hoffler.
But the bottom line is that McDonnell took money from Hoffler when Hoffler's actions were under legal scrutiny.
State government in Virginia is largely clean and run by competent, ethical professionals. The Game Department was slow to get that memo, but this week's indictments send an unambiguous message to everyone.
Except the public, sadly.
McDonnell would be well-advised to add some campaign finance reforms to his legislative agenda next year, but first he'll need to give his own election kitty a good scrubbing.
|
|
| | << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next > End >>
| | Results 28 - 36 of 81 |
|
|
