Transparency News, 12/19/2022

 

Monday
December 19, 2022

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Contact us at vcog@opengovva.org

 

state & local news stories

 

WHO IS YOUR FOI HERO?
VCOG is seeking nominations for its open government awards for citizens, press and government.
Click here for details.

Bills to watch:
SB 813. This is a bill Sen. Scott Surovell agreed to carry for VCOG. It involves employee names on credit card statements. The Department of Accounts has been advising state agencies over the past couple of years to redact the names from the statements, saying it was an internal security control. The result is that the public doesn't know who made the purchase. Rogue employees are shielded from scrutiny, while every by-the-book employee gets tagged with suspicion for any controversial purchases.
Follow our 2023 session chart

A Virginia agency is giving the public a peep at the state’s environmental permitting process through a new online platform, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office announced Friday. The Permitting Enhancement and Evaluation Platform, or PEEP, is an online resource that shows where permit applications and other Department of Environmental Quality approvals are in the review process. The agency says the goal is to create transparency, collaboration and efficiency in its evaluations. Youngkin described PEEP in a statement as “an open and efficient online process where all of the permitting decisions are made for everyone to see.” 
Virginia Mercury

Gov. Glenn Youngkin has asked the state’s inspector general to investigate the Virginia State Police’s hiring of Austin Lee Edwards, the now-deceased cop who killed three family members of a 15-year-old Riverside, California, girl he “catfished” online. Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson for Youngkin, confirmed Thursday that the inspector general will “undertake an independent and thorough investigation of all allegations” surrounding Edwards’ hiring. Porter declined to specify which agencies are being investigated. The state inspector general’s office does not have the authority to probe local policing agencies, according to Kate Hourin, the office’s spokeswoman. Hourin declined to comment further.
Los Angeles Times

Is it getting more expensive to rent a home or apartment in Norfolk? A group of community activists going by the name CityWork published data this week showing the city’s renters are increasingly “struggling to pay the rent.” CityWork founder Alex Fella said the data and accompanying interactive map published this week show “rental prices are a lot higher” in Norfolk than most people might think, and are having an outsized impact on renters young and old. Fella, 29, organized CityWork in September as a volunteer-run research group that collects and analyzes data to explore local issues like affordable housing, public safety and food insecurity. Fella previously worked for the Urban Renewal Center, a local nonprofit, and has published several independent research projects focused on affordable housing in the city. Fella said the data used in his most recent endeavor is the product of “web scraping” sites like Zillow and Rent.com, organizing the data by census tract and comparing the rent prices with demographic and income data in 2021 U.S. Census data released in early December.
The Virginian-Pilot

A new map of lower Montgomery County (Maryland), including some of the Washington region’s most affluent suburbs, reveals an ugly past: scores of neighborhoods deemed Whites-only for decades. The interactive map devised by county planners shows areas of Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Silver Spring and Takoma Park that had racial covenants for much of the 20th century. The restrictions, which remain written into property deeds, prohibited homes from being sold or rented to people of “negro blood or extraction” or anyone not “of the Caucasian race.” Some also prohibited Jews, as well as Asians, Armenians, Syrians and other nationalities. By overlaying the maps with other data, researchers are exploring how those patterns might continue to play out in neighborhood home values, access to public transportation, government investment and health outcomes. In the Washington region, mapping of racial covenants also is underway in the District, Alexandria, and Prince George’s, Fairfax and Arlington counties. Other cities include Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Charlottesville, Seattle and cities across Washington state.
The Washington Post

One day in early June, a swath of Charlottesville’s history all but vanished from the internet. Thousands of stories reported by the Hook — a defunct local paper whose online archives nevertheless had continued to inform historians, residents and public officials — disappeared. Anyone trying to read old stories about the university town’s sagas, scandals and sundry crimes was greeted by the same error message: “Sorry!” In many ways, the erasure of the alternative weekly, whose print and online journalism included matters such as nightlife listings as well as deep investigative work, isn’t unusual. Historians have long warned about the decay of digital news archives, which are increasingly falling victim to mishandling, indifference, bankruptcies and technical failures. But some of the Hook’s founding journalists suspect the archive didn’t simply expire from natural causes. They think someone paid to kill it.
The Washington Post

Two of the three misdemeanor indictments brought against former Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler are related to the firing of a special education teacher who, after reporting she was repeatedly groped by one of her students, filed two Title IX complaints, testified to the special grand jury investigating the school district, and spoke out at a School Board meeting. Ziegler is charged with retaliating or threatening a person for publicly expressing their views on a matter of public concern, and with penalizing an employee for a court appearance. While the particulars of the cases are not yet public, court filings indicate the conflict of interest charge relates to retaliation or threats against Erin Brooks, and the charge for penalizing an employee for a court appearance relates to her firing.
LoudounNow
 

stories of national interest

"Government Attic estimates that at least 60 percent of federal agencies claimed that the documents are in draft form and exempt from disclosure or that they don’t have any such records at all."

The majority of federal agencies — including law enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection — are refusing to release some of the most basic guidance materials used by their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) offices: procedures for how they do their jobs. Government Attic, a website that regularly files FOIA requests and posts the provided records, estimates that at least 60 percent of federal agencies, when faced with filling requests for FOIA standard operating procedures (SOP), claimed that the documents are in draft form and exempt from disclosure or that they don’t have any such records at all. 
Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Oakland County (Michigan) Circuit Court ruled Thursday that public school teachers are not considered public bodies and do not have to provide materials under Freedom of Information Act requests. One significant implication of this ruling is that only public employees who work in the executive branch are considered public bodies for purposes of FOIA. This allows other public bodies to exempt their employees’ records from disclosures. The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, which brought the case, plans to appeal.
Mackinac Center for Public Policy

 

editorials & columns

"That office will never knowingly break the law, but it will search it for provisions favorable to its client’s interest. The office has only one client: the University."

The deck is stacked against the press, at least in the first step. The University of Virginia, unsurprisingly, considers it not in its interests to release information to the press about the work of its threat assessment team in the case of Christopher Darnell Jones. Mr. Jones, after that team failed to act, shot five people, killing three. UVa’s Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, the Act) Officer works in the University Counsel’s office. The University Counsel’s job under Virginia law in civil matters is to defend the University. Protect it from things inimical to its interests. The fact that this office also fields FOIA requests is and must be informed by that primary responsibility. That office will never knowingly break the law, but it will search it for provisions favorable to its client’s interest. The office has only one client: the University.
James C. Sherlock, Bacon's Rebellion

 

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