Transparency News 2/9/16

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

State and Local Stories


The Senate General Laws Committee advanced two bills affecting access to public employee salary data. Current law says the names, job classifications and positions of employees making over $10,000 must be released. One of the bills (SB 202) would raise that floor from $10,000 to around $30,000 and would prohibit “publicly accessible databases.” The other (SB 552) would prohibit the release of names in association with salary data for all government employees. It would also say job classification and position information for law enforcement and fire marshals would be exempt. (Read the stories below about these bills.)

The committee also passed a bill (SB 645) expanding the critical infrastructure exemption and implementing an unprecedented mechanism that allows private parties (businesses, actually) to object to disclosure of certain information. Only one member of the committee voted against it.

Also, SB 560 was voted on in Senate Courts of Justice and passed on a 8-7 vote. SB 560 eliminates the longstanding practice of advertising residential real estate foreclosures in newspapers of general circulation and substitutes a notice system based on posting at the courthouse and on the local court's website. The Virginia Press Association is asking for support to defeat this bill when it is presented on the Senate floor this week. (See the editorial on this bill below.)

Please contact your senator and express your opposition to all of these bills!

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Legislation that could make it nigh impossible to discover the annual salaries of most state and local employees is headed to the Senate floor for a vote. Senate Bill 552 cleared committee Monday by a single vote, and with some confusion over just how broad the bill was — it was pitched as protection only for law enforcement names. Virginia Press Association attorney Craig Merritt told Senate General Laws and Technology Committee members that the newest version of the bill would cover not just law enforcement but also "every living breathing employee" in state and local government. A committee attorney confirmed that reading after the meeting.
Daily Press
Identity theft and the Islamic State group were offered Monday as reasons lawmakers should prohibit release of public employee salary databases and raise the threshold for which salaries are public. Senators on the General Laws and Technology Committee approved two bills limiting access to that information.
Virginian-Pilot

A Richmond firefighter is suing the city claiming he was denied information related to a promotion. Tony Wells says his Freedom of Information Act request was ignored. After a recent round of promotions, Wells requested paperwork on the evaluation process, but after a month, he says he was still waiting for these documents. Anyone can ask government officials for public records under the Freedom of Information Act. It's often called a FOIA request. By law, the government has about a week to give you answers, documents or even emails. "I got a response saying they need additional time, that they would get the documents for me, I never heard anything," said Wells. Wells filed a petition with the court to get the records.
NBC12

National Stories

In the latest cyberattack targeting the federal government, an intruder gained access to information for thousands of employees at the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, but officials said Monday that there was no indication that sensitive information had been stolen. Most of the information appeared to have been culled from internal government directories, including employees’ email addresses, phone numbers and job titles. Motherboard, a technology news site, reported on Sunday that it had been approached by a hacker who claimed to have obtained employee information on about 20,000 people at the F.B.I. and 9,000 at the Department of Homeland Security.
New York Times

"My vote is for the Western-Red Line," read the response to a transit agency's Facebook post inviting the public to attend a public meeting in Norfolk, Va., to discuss light-rail route options. The agency left the comment hanging out there. No "like." No reply. It's a safe assumption that this "vote" didn't make a difference in the agency's decision-making process. The transit agency is hardly alone. It's common for agencies to discount public comments when they are received on a social-media platform, as a recent study I conducted documents. Yet, this very same comment -- "for the Western-Red Line" -- likely would have triggered a variety of reactions from the agency if it had been delivered in person at the public meeting. Most government agencies have established processes, many times to comply with regulations, that might require such a comment to be formally documented and presented to decision makers. Same comment + different delivery method = different outcome. That shouldn't be. It's time we made public input via social media "official." Government has allowed public-participation policies and practices to fall out of step with contemporary communications habits, social-media adoption in particular.
James Toscano, Governing

Long before corporations embraced big data and business intelligence, the public sector was on the case, collecting mountains of data with hopes of finding efficiencies, making service improvements and bettering the lives of constituents. This type of data hoarding follows the old logic: It's better to have something and not need it than the reverse. But if government agencies aren't careful, this hoarding habit could result in an uninhabitable, unproductive operation -- just as it does for the hoarders we see on television. Government databases are filled with everything from traffic data to pet-ownership statistics, and many agencies lack the necessary staff and infrastructure to maintain and analyze all of this information. Public-sector data analysts report that they spend 47 percent of their time collecting and organizing data but less than a third of their time actually gleaning actionable insights from it. A primary cause of government data hoarding is the public sector's fragmentation: Data is segregated into specific departmentalized systems and in most cases cannot be compared or analyzed across entire organizations. As a result, analysts are forced to run multiple reports from each system and manually combine all of the data into spreadsheets. It's a time-consuming and error-prone process that many refer to as "Excel Hell."
Erin Latham, Governing

Records related to “critical infrastructure” would become exempt from disclosure under Idaho’s public records law if a bill that was introduced Friday passes. “Anyone can walk into any government office and get whatever blueprints they want,” Will Hart, executive director of the Idaho Consumer Owned Utilities Association, told the House State Affairs Committee. Hart said he supports open records laws, but the changes are needed to protect records of critical infrastructure.
MagicValley.com

More than eight months before Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder disclosed a deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak in the Flint area, federal health officials worried a lack of cooperation in Michigan could be hampering the public health response. Thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Detroit Free Press on Monday show increasing concern about the quality of the Flint's drinking water as tensions grew over a lack of coordination to combat the waterborne disease. County health officials were warned for reaching out to federal experts for help while they struggled to persuade Flint city officials to provide needed information, the emails show. Others in emails wondered about ethical breaches and the possibility of a cover-up.
USA Today


Editorials/Columns

You've got to give Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. "Tommy" Norment Jr. credit — he knows who his friends are, and plays hardball when people get in his way. We believe that's the reason Sen. Norment, R-James City County, has championed — indeed authored — SB 560. It's a bill bankers want so they can save money when they foreclose on a home and one that also happens to hit the finances of newspapers that spend a lot of time keeping an eye on the antics and ethics of elected officials, including Sen. Norment. If voters in this state don't speak up, this bill will destroy the contract agreed upon between you and your banker when you took out a mortgage on your home. The bank is required to publish a public warning for three days in the local newspaper before it forecloses. State law requires warnings; but it is the contract between borrower and banker that requires newspaper publication. The choice of newspapers makes perfect sense — not only are they still the largest single news medium in any market, but on the Peninsula, 86.3 percent of our subscribers own a home, according to Nielson-Scarborough research. Sen. Norment's bill would free bankers from that requirement and allow them to get by with posting a notice on the local courthouse door, or on the Internet. If a homeowner isn't comfortable with the World Wide Web and doesn't make a habit of going by the courthouse every day, the law puts them at a disadvantage. If this law passes, a homeowner may never find out he or she is about to lose his or her home — until it has already happened.
Daily Press

At long last, Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment has relented and allowed reporters to return from their exile in the Senate gallery to which he banished them. Few can comprehend why he ever did so in the first place. Petty spite seems the only coherent explanation. Petty spite also would explain the new seating arrangements. Gone are the tables where reporters once worked. Now, as the photo illustrates, they are consigned to office chairs with small lap-desk armatures. Perhaps next year it will be folding camp stools. Whatever the reason, Norment certainly has a bee up his nose about those who keep the public informed. This year he is sponsoring a measure (SB 560) that would yank foreclosure notices from newspapers and hide them in circuit court buildings and websites. That might be helpful to banks (Norment’s No. 1 contributor is the banking industry) and real-estate speculators but it’s a bad deal for ordinary citizens. Virginia has one of the shortest foreclosure periods in the nation. The only way to offset an accelerated foreclosure period is to balance it with a broad disclosure policy that informs as many people as possible. Norment has introduced another measure (SB 564) that would carve out further exemptions to the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Senators say the leadership wanted to avoid a public vote on reopening the floor to the press — and it did. Even if the vote were strictly procedural — say, on whether the Senate should accelerate consideration of a revision to the rules — were it approved with a half-dozen or so independently minded Republicans joining the 19 Democrats, the remaining Republicans would be seen as resisting transparency in government. That public-relations problem is tied to any number of proposals this year that would impede the public’s right to know but have nothing to do with whether reporters cover the Senate from the floor. Still, a vote against the press in Richmond could generate headaches back home, with local reporters and editors eager to get on the record the politicians who, in effect, voted against going on the record.
Jeff Schapiro, Richmond Times-Dispatch