Transparency News 2/8/18

 
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Thursday
February 8, 2018
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state & local news stories
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Acknowledging that his bill to exempt administrative records of the judiciary from FOIA was controversial, the patron moved to strike it from the Senate floor on Wednesday. "We use a term around here to say that a bill's got a fever," said patron Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Stafford. "Well I think this one caught on fire." Stuart told senators his bill was to "clarify" that administrative records of the courts are exempt from the state Freedom of Information Act. The bill also said the Supreme Court's Office of the Executive Secretary would be exempt from FOIA. "I do believe that they are exempt from FOIA," Stuart said. "However, some people didn't." Among those who don't are a District Court judge in Accomack County, who last year found that the Office of the Executive Secretary was in violation of the FOIA for not responding to some letters from a citizen who has been seeking access to records of the office's long-distance phone calls as well as records of expense accounts used by judges. Part of that case remains on appeal in Richmond Circuit Court.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Very glad that he withdrew the bill today,” said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. “I will still be watching to make sure that other bills aren’t amended to include this same kind of information.” Rhyne, who said her group has been very vocal about this bill since it was proposed, said that any further conversation about exempting the judiciary from FOIA should include clear rules over records access, and they must be “in place and accessible and knowable to the public.”
Daily Press

The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors will do some strategic planning and team building in South Boston this weekend thanks to funding from a local nonprofit foundation. It’s all part of a Friday through Saturday retreat that would be paid for with a $25,000 grant from the Danville Regional Foundation, which targets quality-of-life projects throughout the region. All seven supervisors, as well as five executive staff, will stay at the Berry Hill Resort and Conference Center. Public bodies holding a retreat away from their locality is legal, said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Williamsburg-based watchdog group Virginia Coalition for Open Government. Still, there are concerns about it being inaccessible to the general public the political body represents.
Register & Bee
(see related op-ed below)

The Virginia General Assembly is one step closer to closing a loophole that allows students’ personal contact information to be public information. By a vote of 62-35, the House of Delegates passed HB 1 by Del. Tony Wilt, R-Rockingham, that would exempt student contact information from publicly available records unless students or their parents explicitly say otherwise. All of the “no” votes came from Democrats. Del. Chris Hurst, D-Blacksburg, who introduced his own legislation to close the same loophole, opposed Wilt’s bill. Hurst’s bill failed in a House subcommittee last month.
The Roanoke Times

The Virginia House of Delegates passed legislation Wednesday to shield students’ personal contact information after a political group used cellphone numbers to urge college students to vote in last year’s election. The Republican-controlled chamber voted 62-35 to approve House Bill 1, with 35 Democrats voting against the legislation and 12 Democrats voting for it.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
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national stories of interest
Mechanical repair records for an Iowa school bus were altered a week after it caught fire, killing the driver and a student Dec. 12, 2017, according to new inspection reports obtained by the Des Moines Register. The bus was ordered to immediately cease transporting students after a Dec. 6 inspection — six days before the fire — found two critical mechanical failures: one involving an exit lock signal that was not audible and another involving a malfunctioning outside warning light. The Riverside district said handwritten notes initialized by the district's transportation supervisor indicate the fixes were made the same day as the inspection. “I discovered that the inspection records for Riverside bus #4 had been changed to show the out-of-service items as being repaired,” Max Christensen, an executive of the Iowa Department of Education, said in the letter to National Transportation Safety Board investigators. “This concerned me, as I didn’t believe those records should have been touched or changed while the accident is under investigation by NTSB.”
USA Today

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s administration is forcing state lawmakers to use the public-records law to get emails regarding a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at the Illinois Veterans’ Home in Quincy. Illinois Public Health Director Nirav Shah told a joint House-Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee that his agency denied Senate committee chairman Tom Cullerton’s demand for communication about the crisis under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.
The Seattle Times

 
quote_2.jpg"I didn’t believe those records should have been touched or changed while the accident is under investigation."
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editorials & columns
quote_3.jpg"That it made it as far as it did is shameful."
All because a reporter asked questions, a bill that would have exempted an entire branch of state government from the Virginia Freedom of Information Act made its way out of committee and onto the full Senate before its patron decided to pull the proverbial plug. Until late Wednesday afternoon, the bill was on the agenda of the full Senate. It was passed by for action on Tuesday, a sign it was encountering bipartisan opposition. That turned out to be the case. Simply put, this bill was bad law. It was unnecessary, antithetical to the very principle of transparent government, government “of, by and for the people” and a total waste of legislators’ valuable time. That it made it as far as it did is shameful.
The News & Advance

Good decisions are usually aided by well-considered plans. This weekend the Board of Supervisors will hold a two-day retreat to develop a game plan to make Pittsylvania the best County in the Commonwealth. This group of Supervisors is adamant that the County makes itself better for our children and the best among peers. But how do we do it? How do we get there? We are fortunate to have received a grant from the Danville Regional Foundation to lead the Board on a yearlong journey to set a course for County work. This weekend the Board and its executive staff will speed 16 hours together asking hard questions and coming to agreement on how to move the County forward. But, to where? The Board will be asked to agree on a future state 10 or 20 years from now, the path by which we will arrive and the things they can do the next 23 months to advance the cause.
David Smitherman (Pittsylvania County Administrator), Star-Tribune

 

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