Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 01/21/2011 7:13:07 AM PST by La Lydia
RICHMOND – Delegate Bob Marshall needs to severely revamp two bills he’s introduced in reaction to the University of Virginia withholding controversial climate change research, members of a House subcommittee told him Thursday. The Manassas Republican wants public employees to be fired if they willfully withhold documents that are subject to disclosure via the Freedom of Information Act. His target: UVA employees who withheld climate change documents from him last year.
But the bill Marshall offered before the FOIA/procurement subcommittee of the House general laws committee contains language he didn’t intend. It allows a judge to terminate the employment of a public employee if they’ve been found guilty of violating FOIA. Marshall, who does not possess a law degree, offered a disclaimer. He’d simply asked for staff to create a bill that contained punishment for violating FOIA, he said.
“I just asked … to draw me up a statute where there was something punitive there,” Marshall said.
“I think this has a serious flaw in it because I don’t think anyone here on this panel wants to give the court power to fire somebody,” Subcommittee chairman Salvatore Iaquinto said.
Marshall’s using the bill to push back against the university after a tussle over climate change research. Last spring, he sent a FOIA request to UVA asking for documents produced by former professor Michael Mann, whose research was part of some controversial climate change findings. The university at first said it no longer had access to the documents.
But after Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaed the research, UVA reversed the story and told Marshall the documents will cost $8,300 to produce. Marshall says they shouldn’t cost that much...The committee voted unanimously to send the bill to the state’s FOIA Advisory Council for revision. Its death would signal a blow to public accountability at UVA, Marshall said.
“They’re not following the spirit of Mr. Jefferson’s founding of that university,” he said.
Michael Mann is at the center of the Climategate scandal. In November 2009, hackers obtained emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that had been exchanged by Mann and other climatologists and posted them online, triggering the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, dubbed "Climategate" by the media.
That seems simple enough to me.
What Marshall wants to accomplish with this bill shouldn’t be all that hard.
That both he, and his staff, have somehow managed to fumble it does not reflect well on them.
(I don’t hold a law degree either.)
Having had some experience in this area, my best guess is that legislative council (who don’t work for him) disagree with his goals, and sabotaged the bill language so as to foil him. Like I said, I don’t have a problem with firing public employees for stymieing FOIA requests.
Good idea.
Did you and I pay to have this research done?
If I pay for something and someone else prevents me from obtaining that product, there’s gonna be more than words exchanged in short order.
Yes, both federal and state taxes paid for this research. But apparently some in the Virginia House of Delegates and at the university think we don’t have a right to see it.
That’s really what this is all about, and poor Marshall is definitely outclassed in the stealth department.
Here we go:
Government at work: spend $500,000 to save $8,000 (lawyers Fees fighting e-Mail request from AG)
pinging again.
Da Da Daaaa
Thanks. I remember reading that post. 500K verse 8k.
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