Transparency News 8/29/18

Wednesday
August 29, 2018

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state & local news stories

"City Manager Randy Eads confirmed that Fleenor was served with paperwork Tuesday night but refused to describe or characterize the contents of the document or to provide a copy."

A sore spot for members of Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board was the focus of renewed attention on Tuesday, with pointed questions addressed to the two city councilors in attendance. The board also discussed the ability to collect public complaints about the police while still keeping the identities of the complainants private. City Attorney John Blair said his department would look into ways the board could keep complainant identities private but noted it could be difficult due to Freedom of Information Act requirements. 
The Daily Progress

According to the Virginia FOIA Council’s website, there are more than 100 exemptions afforded for records and meeting requests. Some frequently applied records exemptions include; personnel information, legal advice, proprietary information, and documents relating to ongoing negotiations. The FOIA Council also has a full list of record exemptions available online. Law enforcement and public school systems are afforded other exemptions specific to those agencies. Below is a general guide to accessing City of Virginia Beach documents using FOIA requests.
Southside Daily

Bristol city leaders took steps Tuesday to remove Doug Fleenor from the City Council. During a break in Tuesday’s meeting for a closed session, a city police officer served Fleenor with a document as he was walking out of City Hall. Fleenor didn’t return for the remainder of the meeting, but, reached at home by phone later, Fleenor confirmed that his fellow council members want to remove him. Fleenor, an attorney, said he doesn’t know how he will respond and declined further comment. There was no mention of the situation during any portion of Tuesday’s nearly four-hour meeting, but the council went into three separate closed sessions, including one dealing with “personnel,” which lasted about 28 minutes. Reached after the meeting, City Manager Randy Eads confirmed that Fleenor was served with paperwork Tuesday night but refused to describe or characterize the contents of the document or to provide a copy to the Herald Courier. There have been times when Fleenor has clashed with other council members and city residents. Earlier this month, the council approved a series of guidelines for conducting meetings, a move Fleenor opposed because he said the rules were vague and limited discussions.
Bristol Herald Courier

Strapped to a chair at the arms and legs. A hood pulled over your head. For Virginia parents, a state investigation's findings earlier this year on the treatment of immigrant teens in a detention center was a wake up call. The use of physical restraint, mechanical restraints and seclusion on children shocked many; but investigators concluded that abuse did not occur, because such treatment is within legal guidelines in Virginia. What many parents did not realize is that much of the same use of restraint and seclusion — including strapping teenagers to chairs and locking them in seclusion rooms — is also allowed in public schools throughout the Commonwealth. In the 2013-2014 school year, public school students in the state were restrained more than 6,000 times. They were strapped to chairs, physically restrained or placed into seclusion. This is according to the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, the only source of comprehensive data about the use of restraint in the nation’s public schools.
News Leader

The Town of Strasburg recently overhauled its website in a move that town officials hope will make the town’s website easier for people to navigate. The new website is more mobile-friendly than the town’s previous website.
The Northern Virginia Daily

national stories of interest

Anyone in public life expects criticism. But sometimes it gets personal. The temptation in those situations is strong to shut up the naysayers, but doing so might be against the law. In May, a judge ruled that President Trump could not block people from following him on Twitter. It was the most prominent in a series of rulings finding that access to public figures on social media is a constitutional right. “The suppression of critical commentary regarding elected officials is the quintessential form of viewpoint discrimination against which the First Amendment guards,” Judge James Cacheris wrote in a case involving a supervisor in Fairfax County, Va. Politicians often claim that their social media accounts are personal, not public property. But public officials also use these same accounts to conduct official business or make announcements.
Governing
 

"Politicians often claim that their social media accounts are personal, not public property."

editorials & columns

"The void left by the loss of independent, professional reporters will be filled by far less reliable sources of news and other information."

One of the oldest axioms in the messy business of governing is that politics makes strange bedfellows. One of the oddest alliances to form of late is between the right-leaning National Rifle Association and the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union. The civil liberties group is defending the gun-rights group against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to use the power of the state to put the NRA out of business. On Saturday, the ACLU filed an amicus brief on behalf of the NRA. The civil liberties group believes that Cuomo’s targeting of a nonprofit advocacy group and attempts to deny it financial services are “a blatant violation of the First Amendment.” The ACLU also notes that threatening the rights of one advocacy group threatens the rights of all. It contends that “[a]lthough public officials are free to express their opinions and may condemn viewpoints or groups they view as inimical to public welfare, they cannot abuse their regulatory authority to retaliate against disfavored advocacy organizations and to impose burdens on those organizations’ ability to conduct lawful business.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch

I understand why most local-government officials and many other civic leaders don't like reporters. Some journalists can be uninformed, easily distracted by the sensational, or strangely uninterested in the bigger and better stories that are happening around them. But, man, are you going to miss these folks when they are gone. That's because the void left by the loss of independent, professional reporters will be filled by far less reliable sources of news and other information: rumor, gossip and particularly social media, which so often are dominated by angry or frightened people with little interest in facts. And this will be much, much worse.
Otis White, Governing