Transparency News 6/22/16

State and Local Stories

The York County Board of Supervisors designated a Freedom of Information Act officer during its Tuesday night meeting. The board appointed Gail Whittaker, a 23-year county employee and York's public information coordinator, to the position. According to Neil Morgan, the county administrator, recent state legislation required all counties to adopt a FOIA officer. Currently, a high percentage of the county's requests come from a single private citizen, but, Morgan said, that doesn't change the county's responsibilities. "If somebody wants to know something and there's a record, we provide it," he said. He said he hopes the individuals who make FOIA requests of the county understand the information they get needs context to have value. On her end, Whittaker just wants the residents who make requests to understand there can be costs and that people can request an estimate of the charges ahead of time.
Daily Press

Richmond City Auditor Umesh Dalal’s job performance is facing scrutiny from the Richmond City Council, which has held four closed meetings about Dalal since April and is planning a fifth for Monday. It’s not clear what is prompting concerns and how widespread they are among the council members. At one point during the most recent meeting, held Tuesday, raised voices were audible in the council chambers from the adjacent room where the members were meeting. She declined to offer any comment after Tuesday’s meeting. The three other council members who were in attendance — Jonathan T. Baliles, Michelle R. Mosby and Cynthia I. Newbille — did not return to the council’s chambers after the closed session and instead exited through a side door.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

One day in March, Ikea representatives were in Norfolk talking with city officials about plans for the chain’s first Hampton Roads store. The negotiations were so secret the city had given them the code name “Project Neptune.” Ikea said Tuesday it plans to break ground in the spring and open a 331,000-square-foot Norfolk store in mid-2018. The mood during the announcement on the top floor of the Slover Library was jubilant. The deal followed years of on-and-off talks, months of negotiations and a last-minute snag that required the governor to intervene.
Virginian-Pilot


National Stories
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A Texas judge arrested for making a secret deal committing his county to a 10-year contract with a red-light camera company was suspended Tuesday for allegedly blowing right past the state's Sunshine Laws. Judge Joel Patrick Baker of Smith County was arrested last week, after an activist group complained his 2014 meeting with American Traffic Solutions officials violated the Texas Open Meetings Act. Baker was charged with three misdemeanor counts of violating the act. The grand jury's indictment charged that Baker, by meeting privately and conducting business on behalf of the county, knowingly closed a regular Smith County Commissioners Court meeting to the public. "I am not guilty of these charges. At no time did I or any member of the court knowingly violate the Texas Open Meetings Act," Baker said. "I maintain this was not a mission to find the truth, rather a political witch hunt. I look forward to producing the true facts to a jury. I am confident a jury will find these charges to be frivolous."
Fox News

Federal officials professed a commitment to "the highest level of transparency possible" Monday after uncensoring two easy-to-guess names in the transcript of a 50-second call between Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen and a 911 police dispatcher. But experts in federal and Florida open records laws say much more transparency will come as people seek access to the recording itself and a full readout or recording of three subsequent calls between Mateen and police, totaling about 28 minutes. The experts say open records laws likely require release of each of the conversations, which were only excerpted Monday but for the 911 call, which initially had "Islamic State" and the name of the group's leader, "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi," censored. “I suspect the redactions are a gambit to delay or foot drag on the release of records that ultimately a court would order released,” says Villanova University law professor Tuan Samahon. “Delay, after all, can be a powerful tool to help defeat political accountability for failing to follow prior leads on the suspect and to avoid use of the tragedy by political opponents.”
US News & World Report