Transparency News 6/13/17

Tuesday, June 13, 2017



State and Local Stories

There are certain kinds of requests for records that access professionals hate so much they wish they could find ways to outlaw them. Requests that frustrate them so much they wish they didn’t have to respond to them. Let’s call them nuisance requests. So what makes for a nuisance request? Records custodians said they are requests made with an inappropriate intent, and custodians don't think the requester has a need to know. They are fishing expeditions, in which requesters won’t explain what they want and they are trying to capture something randomly. They are recurring, and they are voluminous, wrongly formatted, inconvenient requests.  However, the intent of open government laws is to allow public access, no matter how annoying and overarching the request. None of these are appropriate reasons to deny access. That said, records requesters can still ensure that they are as precise as they can be in requesting so that they are not engendering an adversarial response.
Shelley Kimball, Truth in the Field Blog
(Kimball serves on the VCOG Board of Directors and edits the Truth in the Field Blog.)

More than 200 people have signed a petition calling for the ouster of a board overseeing a social services department that ignored reports of child abuse and neglect, the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors was told Monday night. The supervisors took no immediate action on a request that they remove the county’s three representatives from the social services board. A seven-month investigation by the grand jury confirmed earlier reports that in some cases, complaints of possible child abuse or neglect were ignored or given short shrift by the agency. Much of the blame fell to a former supervisor, who no longer works for the department, who stymied many cases — pressuring her subordinates not to investigate some reports and feeding copies of other complaints into a paper shredder.
Roanoke Times

Spotsylvania County School Board member Amanda Blalock unexpectedly resigned Monday after another board member questioned her eligibility to represent the Lee Hill District. Blalock, first elected in 2007, originally planned to vacate her Lee Hill seat July 1 because her family purchased a home in the county’s Chancellor District. She said in an interview Monday that her family closed on the home May 15 and moved in a couple weeks later. But Blalock said she rented her former home until the end of this month so that she could maintain residency in the Lee Hill District and serve until the end of the fiscal year, June 30. She maintains she did nothing wrong, but said she did not want to be a distraction. School Board member Kirk Twigg and the Fredericksburg Virginia Patriots tea party group raised concerns about her eligibility to serve. 
Free Lance-Star

The Potomac Nationals are issuing an ultimatum to Prince William County lawmakers: sign a new stadium deal in July or wave goodbye to the minor league team. The county signed a nonbinding “letter of intent” with the team in March, agreeing to the framework of a deal to finally help the P-Nats move out of the aging Pfitzner Stadium. Prince William would build the new facility by raising money through Industrial Development Authority bonds, and the team would pay the county back over the 30 years or so. Yet some supervisors have expressed concern about the structure of the deal and suggested that if the team can’t make its roughly $2.7 million annual payment to the county, taxpayers would be on the hook instead. That’s why Supervisor Pete Candland, R-Gainesville, wants to put the deal on the ballot this fall, and he’s called for a second vote on the issue at the board’s June 20 meeting — the same measure died on a 4-4 vote in April. But Silber and the owners of the land where the stadium would be built, the JBG Cos., are imploring supervisors not to approve a referendum. Tom Sebastian, JBG’s senior vice president of development, puts it in stark terms: “A vote to go for the referendum is a vote to kill the project.”
Inside NoVa



National Stories
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The U.S. Secret Service said Monday it doesn't have any recordings or transcripts of any tapes recorded within President Donald Trump's White House, a disclosure that failed to rule out whether any tapes exist of Trump's conversations with ousted FBI Director James Comey. The agency made the disclosure in response to a freedom of information request by The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper noted that it doesn't exclude the possibility of recordings created by another entity.
McClatchy

A US District Court judge in Washington gave the Justice Department one month to make public a page of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' clearance form, on which he was meant to disclose any contacts with Russian officials. The judge's decision issued Monday afternoon also gave the Justice Department and the FBI one month to search for any records of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus' reported outreach to the FBI requesting the bureau refute reports of communications between Russian officials and members of the Trump campaign. The decision came in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from American Oversight, a nonprofit that says it relies on FOIA to investigate the Trump administration.
CNN

Anne Frank would have turned 88 years old on Monday, and it was 75 years ago she received a diary for her 13th birthday. Frank was only 15 when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but her words, as published in "The Diary of a Young Girl," have taught generations about the Holocaust. Now the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is launching a Kickstarter campaign to help preserve hundreds of other Holocaust diaries and first-person accounts.  The campaign, titled "Save Their Stories: The Undiscovered Diaries of the Holocaust," seeks to raise $250,000 (about £197,475 or AU$332,520) to "catalog, preserve, and make available online over 200 Holocaust diaries in the Museum's collection -- for the first time ever." 
CNET News

The attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia hope a little-known clause in the Constitution will force President Donald Trump to separate himself from his businesses and release his tax returns and other financial information. They contend in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that he's corruptible to foreign governments. The emoluments clause bars the president from accepting foreign gifts and payments without congressional approval.
McClatchy


Editorials/Columns


Leaking has always been a bipartisan game in Washington and, occasionally, it has revealed information that the public needs to know. Elections have meaning, and federal employees and contractors who refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth should be prosecuted when they betray their country by revealing secret information to the world. We look forward to more arrests — and to a fair, public trial for Reality Winner.
Richmond Times-Dispatch, via Daily Progress

The problem with expungement, most urgently in the cases of false arrest, is that the government is shredding the evidence of its own mistakes. This is a huge concern, as the ACLU of Ohio has pointed out, in cases in which the practices and procedures of police officers are in question. The victims themselves may want these records preserved. Sometimes these records become relevant decades later. On the flip side, there are times when the government has a legitimate need to review records as well.
Dennis Hetzel, The Columbus Dispatch