Transparency News 6/19/18

 

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Tuesday
June 19, 2018

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state & local news stories

 

Richmond residents won’t see the proposals for three new schools that will be paid for through a controversial tax increase until after the city selects a company to oversee the schools’ design. The city has received design proposals for new George Mason and E.S.H. Greene elementary schools, as well as Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School. The three schools are being built thanks to a 1.5 percentage point increase to the city’s meals tax, a proposal from Mayor Levar Stoney that passed through the Richmond City Council after weeks of heated debate between the schools and restaurant communities. The proposal process is to select a company that will oversee the design of the new schools. The deadline was last week, but the number and content of the proposals received are not being made public.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Professional political lobbying typically is viewed as the apparatus of big corporations and well-funded special interest groups that want to influence government policy — not the domain of ordinary folk. Samantha “Sam” Biggio and Heidi Drauschak, two recent graduates of the University of Richmond School of Law, want to change that through their startup venture, CrowdLobby. “I think lobbying has a really bad stigma, but it is mostly because a lot of us are locked off from it,” Drauschak said. The idea behind CrowdLobby is to enable people to pool financial resources as a crowd to hire professional lobbyists to work on specific legislative issues.
Richmond Times-Dispatch

If you enjoy listening to the police scanner to keep tabs on what’s happening locally, better get your listening in soon. In a joint letter to media today, the chiefs of police in Henrico, Chesterfield and Richmond announced that they will encrypt their agencies’ radio frequencies beginning July 2. The change means that only authorized public safety officials will be able to listen to police communications in the three localities. The change is designed to protect law enforcement officials and members of the community and to ensure that “sensitive personal information” that sometimes is communicated across the frequencies “does not violate legal rights or reasonable expectations of privacy,” wrote the chiefs (Henrico’s Humberto Cardounel, Jr., Chesterfield’s Jeffrey Katz and Richmond’s Alfred Durham). Media members routinely listen to police and fire scanners in order to report on daily events. They’ll now be unable to do so, though the chiefs wrote that their departments individually are exploring ways to keep the media informed of “active, real-time information.”U.S. News & Henrico Citizen

The Stafford Sheriff’s Office Monday declined to release details about a fatal accident Friday that claimed the life of a 21-year-old county woman. Jordan Nicole Garrison, a 2015 graduate of Stafford High School, was killed Friday afternoon in a crash that occurred on White Oak Road in southern Stafford near Town and Country Drive. Witnesses described a grisly scene involving at least two vehicles, but police have released no information regarding how the accident took place or the status of anyone else injured in the crash. The road was shut down for a considerable time Friday as the accident was being investigated. Sheriff’s spokeswoman Amanda Vicinanzo said police are withholding details “out of respect for the families.” According to an obituary posted on the Covenant Funeral Service website, Garrison was a hostess at Cowboy Jacks and an active member of Ramoth Baptist Church.
The Free Lance-Star

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stories of national interest

A North Carolina legislator has released more than 1,100 pages of un-redacted emails after a constituent and the American Civil Liberties Union sought them. The Daily Advance of Elizabeth City reports Republican Rep. Beverly Boswell of Dare County released the emails that the ACLU and Craig Merrill of Kitty Hawk had sought. Merrill asked for the emails mainly because of Boswell’s advocacy of a repeal of a plastic bag ban on the Outer Banks.
AP News

Federal prosecutors have charged a former software engineer at the center of a huge C.I.A. breach with stealing classified information, theft of government property and lying to the F.B.I. The engineer, Joshua A. Schulte, 29, of New York, had been the main suspect in one of the worst losses of classified documents in the spy agency’s history. Government investigators suspect that he provided WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, with a stolen archive of documents detailing the C.I.A.’s hacking operations, but they had not initially charged him in that crime. The breach, known as the Vault 7 leak, was a major embarrassment to the C.I.A. and set off a furious hunt to identify who was behind the 2017 disclosure.
The New York Times

 

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