Category Archives: Government Transparency

Fairness + Accountability = Thriving City

Posted on May 3, 2024 by | 7 comments


by Jon Baliles

The city of Richmond seems to be trying to plug all of the holes in its boat, also known as the U.S.S. Meals Tax Fiasco, that has been taking on water for months. It seems that the city is finally wiping out the erroneous meals tax payments and interest they had charged numerous restaurant accounts in recent years, often amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, without ever telling them the bills were so enormous.

Tyler Layne at CBS6 reported last week that Matt Mullett, the owner of Richbrau Brewing, recently got a call from the city’s Finance Director, who said the city would clear his $50,000 bill that accrued due to bad advice he received four years ago from the Finance Department when they told him he did not need to collect meals taxes on draft beer, even though the department had lost a case just a few years prior.

In addition, Mullet’s business was now finally eligible to receive Enterprise Zone grant money to improve his business. This money had already been approved several years ago, but was not released because the city said they owed all the back meals tax money. Which he didn’t. Nevertheless, Mullet took the high road and was thankful the unnecessary drama and delays were behind him so he can move forward with his business. Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Economic development, Government Finance, Government Transparency, Taxes

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Eclipsing Speech in RVA

Posted on April 6, 2024 by | 58 comments

Richmond City Hall

by Jon Baliles 

Last month, City Council applied a few new stringent guardrails to public comment at Council meetings by altering their Rules of Procedure under the guise of “streamlining” meetings.

Now, I am all for free speech, but I also understand that people showing up to Council meetings to push for a ceasefire, fight world hunger, or colonize Mars (i.e., things Council can’t do anything about) takes up valuable time on issues that Council should be addressing (or trying to address). City Council is granted specific powers, and resolving world issues is (thankfully) not one of them. The business of local government is local and decidedly unsexy: trash pickup, potholes, schools, housing, public safety, transit, development, etc.

Council used to limit each public comment session at each meeting to eight speakers who sign up beforehand with the City Clerk with a brief description of their topic and are each given three minutes to speak. The new rules do not apply to people speaking to issues on the Consent Agenda or Regular Agenda or budget meetings; but lately, almost all of these eight Public Comment slots have been taken by people calling for or against issuing an official resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza, even though Council has not discussed any such resolution. Continue reading →

58 Comments

Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Governance, Government Transparency

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The Letter

Posted on March 26, 2024 by | 14 comments

by Joe Fitzgerald 

“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane.”

Depending on your age, you may think of this as the opening to the Box Tops biggest and most iconic hit. If you don’t follow pop music, you may think any song that begins with “gimme” might be from a news story about a county school board chair.

The line of course kicks off the 1967 hit, “The Letter.” Those two words are being bandied about now in reference to a document the Rockingham County School Board (RCSB) says people can’t be allowed to see.

The Letter was apparently written to the RCSB from the law firm that represented it beginning when LBJ was president and ending last week. “To the RCSB” is the certain part. It may have been from the firm, or from one attorney in the firm.

I have not seen The Letter. I have not talked to anyone who has seen The Letter.

But a lot of people seem to know what is in The Letter. If it was written to the five people on the county board, and each one of them had a single conversation about it, and each of the people spoke to . . . etc. More people have heard about what was in The Letter than have actually seen it. But the degrees of separation mean the knowledge of what’s in The Letter has been paraphrased more than once.

The single thing from The Letter that everybody seems to know is that The Letter and not the county School Board’s secret actions ended the firm’s relationship with the county board. Everybody knowing it does not make it true, but if it is not true, the School Board should perhaps show it was not fired as a client. The board could show that by releasing The Letter. Continue reading →

14 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Government Transparency, Leadership

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Loudoun County Schools Defy FOIA Requests

Posted on January 18, 2024 by | 76 comments

Insignia, Loudon County Public Schools

by Kerry Dougherty

Luke Rosiak is the best investigative reporter in Virginia. There isn’t a close second.

Several years ago, The Daily Wire reporter uncovered Loudoun County Public Schools’ attempts to hide serial bathroom sexual assaults from the public.

Rosiak’s reporting ultimately resulted in the firing of former school superintendent Scott Ziegler. And the election of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who made parents’ rights a cornerstone of his campaign.

Rosiak is tracking down another potential blockbuster, but school officials in Loudoun are not cooperating. Apparently, they never learn.

The Daily Wire is now headed to court to try to wrench documents from the hands of secretive Loudoun school officials. These documents will reveal just how much public money the county’s school district blew in recent years settling embarrassing lawsuits.

So far, school officials are playing cute with FOIA, pretending that certain so-called privacy laws allow them to keep that information secret. Continue reading →

76 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Government Transparency

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Look What UVA Is Hiding

Posted on January 5, 2024 by | 18 comments

by James A. Bacon

Acting on behalf of The Jefferson Council, Walter Smith has filed a complaint in Henrico County against the University of Virginia, seeking a remedy for its refusal to supply documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Smith serves in a volunteer capacity as chair of the Council’s research committee.

The suit alleges 14 instances in which the University’s FOIA staff improperly denied emails and other documents to the Council. Smith’s FOIA requests asked for documents that would shed light on the inner workings of the University’s administrative decision-making process.

The cases highlighted in the complaint illustrate two main themes. First, UVA’s FOIA lawyers have stretched the presidential “working papers” exemption beyond its original intent of protecting the university president’s personal deliberations. Second, the lawyers did not apply privacy protections to Bert Ellis, a Board of Visitors member who was widely perceived as a threat to the university status quo.

“UVa’s FOIA process seems designed to delay and discourage and deny inquiries that may be embarrassing to the Ryan administration,” said Smith. “The administration says it’s all for open inquiry. These are matters of legitimate interest to the public. It seems hypocritical to hide so much.” Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in Education (higher ed), Governance, Government Transparency

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Tough Question: What’s Going On at the Virginia General Assembly?

Posted on November 30, 2023 by | 26 comments

by Gordon C. Morse

Forty years ago, I wrote an essay for the Richmond Times-Dispatch — “The Long and the Short of the Assembly” — that noted “a growing sense that the Virginia General Assembly is not performing satisfactorily,” that it had “devolved into an unhappy spectacle.”

Revisiting that essay recently immediately gave me a headache. The question then and now is whether Virginia’s process for considering proposed new laws or enacting changes to existing laws provides sufficient opportunity for the public, as well as the legislative membership, to understand what’s happening at any given moment and, at some level, participate?

It has long been the habit in Virginia – based on 18th, even 17th century inclinations – to simply get lawmaking done, and as quickly as possible. Having sufficient public “access” was not a major hang-up.

To put it another way, doing legislative work in Virginia was always regarded as important, but there were always other, equally important, things to do. Growing and harvesting crops, for instance. Well into the middle of the 20th century, Virginia remained an agrarian economic/social construct. The legislative calendar reflected that reality.

That changed (sort of) with the 1970 revisions to the Virginia Constitution and there’s no need to dive deep on that subject here, except to say that there were, even then, lingering doubts about the efficacy of unrestrained democratic institutions. This concern was most dramatically expressed when, during the 1901-02 Virginia Constitutional Convention, a proposal to hold the General Assembly to a single meeting once every four years was only narrowly defeated.

But a growing state has growing needs — as my prior boss Gov. Gerald L. Baliles once liked to put it — and the remedies enacted more than 70 years ago, which go to the specific lawmaking structure, may no longer be adequate. (That’s an understatement.) Continue reading →

26 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Government Transparency

Will the Public Ever Get to See the Mass-Shooting Report?

Posted on November 20, 2023 by | 38 comments

Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.

by James A. Bacon

The University of Virginia will delay the release of an external investigation into the Nov. 13, 2022, mass shooting that resulted in three deaths and two woundings until after the trial of Christopher Jones, the UVa student charged with the crime.

“After conferring with counselors and Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley, we have decided that we need to wait until after the criminal proceedings to release further information,” President James Ryan said in a statement appearing Friday on UVa Today. “Making the reports public at this time, or even releasing a summary of their findings and recommendations, could have an impact on the criminal trial of the accused, either by disrupting the case being prepared by the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney, or by interfering with the defendant’s right to a fair trial before an impartial jury.”

Rector Robert Hardie supported the delay. Speaking for the Board of Visitors, he said, “We agree that we should postpone the release of further information until the criminal prosecution is complete to avoid interfering with or complicating the proceedings.”

“This development is disappointing,” responded Tom Neale, president of The Jefferson Council. “The quintuple shooting is one of the most traumatic events to ever occur at UVa, and the university community has a right to know what went wrong. What assurance do we have that the actions the University has taken to improve safety actually address the problems identified in the report? How do we know a similar breakdown won’t occur again?” Continue reading →

38 Comments

Posted in Courts and law, Education (higher ed), Government Transparency

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Stop All Aid to Palestinians and Other Terrorists. Every Bit of It

Posted on October 9, 2023 by | 55 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

On Saturday morning Hamas terrorists unleashed Hell on innocent Israelis. As Israel’s ambassador to the US pointed out, given the population of Israel 600 dead Israelis is the equivalent of 20,000 dead Americans.

This was Israel’s 9-11. Their Pearl Harbor. Some say it was the most deadly day in history for the Jewish state.

And all I can say today, after this weekend of horror in Israel, is thank God for Elon Musk.

Had Musk not spent a chunk of his personal fortune on Twitter, many of us would not have seen the horror Hamas inflicted on innocent Israelis. No way Jack Dorsey’s crowd of left-wingers would have allowed citizen journalists to tell the real story, the unfiltered truth, about the unimaginably grotesque attacks throughout Israel.

We wouldn’t have seen the graphic videos of these fanatical men driving around in a Jeep with the dead body of a young woman in the back like a slaughtered animal, stopping to allow cheering bystanders to spit on her mutilated corpse.

We wouldn’t have seen the bloodied woman – clearly a rape victim – being dragged by her hair into the street by men screaming about Allah and then shoving her into a car overloaded with men who were grabbing for her. God rest her soul. Chances she survived the next few hours are slim.

We wouldn’t have seen the bawling children being shielded by their parents as they were savagely herded into cars and taken as hostages.

We wouldn’t have seen the stacks of bodies.

Nope.

All we’d have is sanitized references to “Hamas militants” – as if this is a regular army – and criticism of “Israel’s right-wing intelligence” for failing to thwart the unprovoked attack on civilians. Oh and lots of whataboutism about how hard life is in Gaza for Palestinians and that Israel is to blame. Continue reading →

55 Comments

Posted in Defense and National Security, Ethics, Government Transparency, Media, Politics, Resilience

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“Blessed“ Is the Second RVA Casino Referendum

Posted on September 23, 2023 by | 18 comments

by Jon Baliles

Early voting has begin in Virginia and the Richmond casino advocates have gone all-in with the mayor and City Council to make sure the referendum got back on the ballot and now are betting the house with an absurd amount of money to make sure the referendum passes this time.

Jimmy Cloutier at Virginia Investigative Journalism has an interesting piece on the all out effort by the casino advocates to buy their way to a victory at the polls  this time around. He points out that two out-of-state companies (Urban One, based in Maryland and Churchill Downs, based in Kentucky) have already raised $8.1 million which “dwarfs the amount of money raised in every Virginia legislative race and ballot initiative in state history, according to an analysis of campaign finance data by OpenSecrets.” Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in Economic development, Elections, Gambling, Government Transparency, Money in politics, Politics, Public safety & health

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Skating Past FOIA in Harrisonburg

Posted on August 23, 2023 by | 10 comments

by Joe Fitzgerald

Public officials will sometimes self-censor their emails, memos, and even texts for fear they’ll be embarrassed or caught telling the truth if a Freedom of Information request is filed. You’d think that caution would make them better communicators. Recent history proves that’s not the case. Sometimes it seems the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, instead frees them to do the bare minimum.

The often unjustified fear of information requests, para-FOIA, ignores how infrequent the requests are, not to mention how vanishingly rare convictions for violations are. Enforcement is by the officials covered by the law, and prosecution is up to the citizen. The real danger, if you can call it that, is a phrase or observation FOIA-ed and ripped out of context and going viral on social media. But in general the people who will do that find it easier to just make stuff up. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in Governance, Government Transparency

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Info-Wars in the College Admissions Debate

Posted on July 6, 2023 by | 27 comments

Credit: Bing Image Creator. Pry the data from my cold dead digital fingers.

by James A. Bacon

It will be exceedingly difficult to hold an honest conversation in Virginia about the role of race in higher-education admissions and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. College administrators are the gatekeepers of data critical to the discussion and they will not share it.

I have been stymied twice this week in my efforts to acquire admissions data: once by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, and once by the University of Virginia. SCHEV and UVa officials cite various justifications for being unable to supply the numbers, but I believe the underlying reason is that university administrators simply don’t want to make the data available. Why? Because he who controls the data controls the narrative.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling restricting the use of race as a factor in admissions, I have embarked upon the mission of laying out the data available in the public domain: how have admissions and enrollment patterns evolved over the past 1o to 20 years? How have preferential policies for selected minorities fared, as tracked by measures of student thriving such as feelings of “belonging,” drop-out rates, student-loan debt burdens and post-graduate income?

In recent posts, I have documented that males and Whites are slightly under-represented in entering classes at UVa, while my colleague Walter Smith has described UVa’s use of the Landscape platform to provide school- and neighborhood-specific “context” for applicants. Last year Smith shed light on the new racial calculus in UVa admissions by showing how offers to applicants vary by race/ethnicity and legacy status. The Office of Admissions, which was commendably open with its data last year, stopped providing it after we published his article.

The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) maintains a searchable online database of higher-ed statistics regarding enrollment, admissions, tuition & fees, financial aid, student debt, retention rates, and degrees awarded. SCHEV breaks the data into dozens of different reports that are searchable by individual institution. It is an invaluable resource for anyone analyzing higher-ed in Virginia. Continue reading →

27 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Government Transparency

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Roanoke County Quietly Extends Contract For $109,000 Year Registrar But Questions Persist

Posted on June 28, 2023 by | 6 comments

by Scott Dreyer

For many historical and cultural reasons, America has traditionally been what sociologists call a “high-trust” society. As reported in this report from the Pew Research Center, cultures with high trust (such as Canada and Sweden) usually have low crime and corruption while the reverse (such as South Africa and Peru) is also true.

Unfortunately, polls show Americans’ trust in major institutions has been on a downward slope for the past 15 years or so. Gallup first measured confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so annually since 1993. A Gallup poll from June 2022 showed significant declines for 11 of the 16 institutions tested and no improvements for any.

Those who expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the three branches of the federal government, newspapers, TV news, big tech, and the criminal justice system were all at 26% or below.

On the issue of voting, most Americans have generally trusted the system, although documented cases of stolen elections exist. One example is the 1948 Democrat primary Senate runoff in Texas. Then-Congressman Lyndon Johnson (D) was initially behind until some mysteriously “uncounted ballots” were found in a ballot box called Box 13. Johnson then won with an 87-vote margin, earning him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.” Johnson went on to defeat the Republican candidate in November and from the Senate later became John F. Kennedy’s vice president and then president after JFK’s assassination. Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Courts and law, Democracy and Western Civilization, Elections, Government Transparency, Leadership, Regulations and Government Oversight, Uncategorized

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Scandal in Plain Sight – Virginia’s Failed Regulation of Law-Avoiding Nursing Home Owners

Posted on June 10, 2023 by | 28 comments

by James C. Sherlock

One of the most important and heart-wrenching decisions families make for their elderly loved ones is whether they are able to keep them in their homes as they get older and sicker.

Sometimes that is not feasible for a long list of reasons in each case.

More than 30,000 Virginians live in nursing homes.

Both the federal government and Virginia regulate them.  The Virginia Department of Health, for both the Commonwealth and the federal government, inspects.

We should be able to expect patients to receive at least basic standards of care. A high percentage in Virginia have not .

In a five-star system, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rates 98 of Virginia’s 289 nursing homes at one star – defined as much below average. More than a third.

Nationwide, only the worst 20 percent receive a one-star rating.

The last time I reported, in October of 2021, those figures were 54 one-star facilities out of 288. Nineteen percent.  So some of our nursing homes have gotten precipitously worse.

The ratings are backward-looking a couple of years, so the measured declines discussed here did not start recently.   By definition of the way that Medicare compiles records and assigns scores, some have been bad for a long time.

People have suffered and died from the lack of proper care and effective oversight. Continue reading →

28 Comments

Posted in Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Efficiency in Government, General Assembly, Governance, Government Transparency, Health Care, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Medicaid, Money in politics, Regulations and Government Oversight

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Judge Orders LCPS to Turn Over Investigation into the Assaults and Rape at Two County Schools

Posted on May 31, 2023 by | 9 comments

by Jeanine Martin

Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge James P. Fischer has ordered Loudoun County Public Schools to turn over its internal investigation into the assaults and rape that occurred in 2021 at two Loudoun County high schools.

The school system had argued that it was privileged information that they need not share with the public. Judge Fischer disagreed and ordered the report to be turned over to the public within 7 days.

From WTOP.com:

The ruling is a win for Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who has been fighting to expose how he says the school district mishandled the incidents.

The judge agreed with prosecutors from the Miyares’ office that the internal report on the 2021 sexual assaults and rape on school grounds was not protected under attorney-client privilege — noting that then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler gave the perception that any findings from the independent investigation were for the public’s benefit.

In a statement, Miyares’ spokeswoman Victoria LaCivita said in part, “We appreciate the courts time and attention to this matter.”

More on the story here.

This piece was originally appeared in The Bull Elephant and is reprinted with permission.

9 Comments

Posted in Children and Families, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Government Transparency, Uncategorized

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Virginia Secedes from National Elections Organization

Posted on May 13, 2023 by | 22 comments

by Jim McCarthy

A February 25 article in Bacon’s Rebellion, “Forget Waldo, Where’s ERIC?” by James Wyatt Whitehouse raised questions about the volunteer national election clearing house organization entitled Electronic Information Registration Center, or ERIC. The BR piece highlighted the experience of the Alabama Secretary of State:

On February 15, 2023, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen paid a visit to the ERIC headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is important to note that Mr. Allen withdrew Alabama from participation in ERIC just a few weeks before his visit. Mr. Allen had this to say about his visit to the Connecticut Avenue headquarters of ERIC, Inc.: ‘I was in DC for a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of States and, since I was in town, I went to see the ERIC Headquarters. What I found was that there was no ERIC headquarters at that address. There were no employees. There were no servers. There was no ERIC presence of any kind. Instead, I found a virtual office that is rentable by the day. What it was missing was people, servers, and any sign of the ERIC team.’

The absence of existential staff and the existence of a virtual office prompted subsequent questions concerning ERIC’s information security and its utility to member states. As noted, Mr. Allen pulled the trigger on his state’s membership weeks before asking his questions. In 2012, Virginia was a founding member of ERIC under the administration of Governor Bob McDonnell.
Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Elections, Electoral process, Governance, Government Transparency, Regulations and Government Oversight, Uncategorized

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