Ohio ranked No. 1 in nation for transparency in government spending

From The Columbus Dispatch After trailing other states, Ohio is now at the top of the list for transparency in government spending.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group announced today that Ohio jumped to No. 1 after being ranked 46th last year.

Ohio received a perfect score of 100 — the highest score the group has ever awarded. Ohio’s jump to the top was the largest single improvement since the group started the ranking six years ago.

The top ranking comes after Treasurer Josh Mandel’s office unveiled OhioCheckbook.com, which tracks spending by all government agencies in the state, in December.

Mandel said the reason his office launched the site was so Ohio could “be leader, not a basement dweller.”

“My ultimate goal here is to help set off a national race for transparency,” Mandel said.

The website has about 112 million transactions going back to fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2014. The treasurer’s office plans to eventually update the site monthly, but isn’t ready to do that yet.

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Dennis Hetzel commentary: Ohio’s public-records law is a real mess

By Dennis Hetzel, published in The Columbus Dispatch and other Ohio papers

In 1963, the Ohio General Assembly fashioned the state’s first open-records law. It took a broad approach to defining public records, with a strong presumption that almost all records kept by government would be open to citizens.

The law was exactly two paragraphs long. It contained only a few exceptions.

How times change. Ohio attorney Breanne Parcels noted in a 2012 article called “Bring Back the Bite” in the University of Dayton Law Review that today’s statute “has ballooned to 10 standard 8 ½ by 11 ½ inch pages.” Today, it’s even longer. With the recent addition of new secrecy to the lethal-injection process, we now have 29 enumerated exceptions plus 100 or more peppered throughout the Ohio statutes.

The definition of what is a government record also has gotten narrower since 1963, and something can’t be an open record if it isn’t a public record. The same problem applies to our open-meetings laws, as the definition of “open to the public” keeps getting tighter.

In other words, a vast amount of government activity in Ohio is invisible to citizens.

How did this happen? That’s a good question to ponder during Sunshine Week, an annual, national effort to promote open government.

Despite the stirring words in our statutes about the “presumption of openness,” our officials frequently give greater weight to reasons to keep matters secret.

In recent years, the Ohio Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to:

• Collect attorney fees in a public records case, even if you’re right and the government broke the law.

• Challenge the government’s claim that it won’t give you records because your request is “ overly broad.”

• Go to a government meeting for “information gathering” or “fact finding” unless the body decides it’s OK for you to be there.

• See criminal case files of closed cases unless the defendant is deceased, which doesn’t help someone much if they have been wrongfully convicted.

• Get spending detail from quasi-public agencies or privatized services that handle vast amounts of public money.

To be fair, in some cases the courts have dealt with language that could be improved. That is where legislative will comes into play. The digital age also creates both problems and opportunities that couldn’t be anticipated in 1963.

Kent State University recently provided an example of how officials exploit these trends to hide information.

The Akron Beacon-Journal reported on March 6 that KSU is paying marketing consultants $101,750 for marketing and promotional services. According to the newspaper, Kent essentially ceded its responsibility for open records to a Philadelphia consulting firm by agreeing in a contract that the school would notify the company of any records request, and that the firm would be able to redact any “proprietary” information under a trade secrets exemption.

Irony alert: One of the blacked-out items was the amount of time for which the company has to review and redact items. Other “trade secrets” include travel costs.

Kent State’s answer should have been this: “We take seriously our responsibilities under the law as a public university, so we will be seeking other bidders who are more concerned about public transparency.”

Well, let’s close on a positive note.

State Treasurer Josh Mandel has unveiled a website, OhioCheckbook.com, which might be the best effort in America to help citizens track state government spending at a detailed level.

State Auditor Dave Yost just announced a program to help citizens dealing with denials of records requests. In many cases, his office will issue a ruling without a person having to hire a lawyer and go to court. This is a major development that levels the playing field for citizens and builds on a free mediation program for local disputes offered by Attorney General Mike DeWine. You can learn more at Yost’s website, OhioAuditor.gov.

Those examples are good news, but they should be more than refreshing exceptions.

As fate would have it, legislators have a great opportunity right now by injecting real transparency into how Ohio’s charter schools are spending nearly $1 billion in public money. Please consider telling them that.

Dennis Hetzel is the executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association and president of the Ohio Coalition for Open Government in Columbus.

Benjamin Marrison: Public records an invaluable resource

By Benjamin Marrison, The Columbus Dispatch This has been a banner week for public records in Ohio.

On Monday, the New York attorney general’s office announced that it had reached an agreement with the Big Three credit-reporting agencies to improve the accuracy of their reports, quickly correct errors and take steps to protect consumers from lingering, erroneous medical debt. This is a big deal.

On Tuesday, the Ohio Supreme Court announced sweeping, unprecedented changes to the broken guardianship system in the Buckeye State, creating uniform standards for those who manage the affairs of those unable to care for themselves. This is a big deal, too.

Investigations by The Dispatch — “Credit Scars” and “Unguarded” — led to both of these major reforms.

At the root of our investigations were public records — documents that lay bare what really happened in the credit industry and to the defenseless wards of court-appointed guardians.

Never forget the value of public records: Those pieces of paper, emails and other documents that governmental entities keep are a type of DNA that explain how and why things happen in government, in our schools, in our courts and elsewhere.

Without our ability to access court documents, we would not have been able to gather the information necessary to publish our five-day series in May that exposed troublesome flaws in the state’s guardianship system. The system is so unregulated that it allowed guardians to avoid ever having to visit those for whom they were responsible, and it enabled some guardians, including some attorneys, to fleece wards through questionable billing.

One of them has been indicted on multiple felony charges.

Public records allowed us to report that some 65,000 of Ohio’s most vulnerable residents are trapped in a system that allowed unscrupulous guardians to rob them of their money, dignity and freedom. The series, available at Dispatch.com/unguarded, revealed that anyone can be a guardian — even a felon — and make decisions about a person’s medical care and finances.

Public records were the building blocks of our reporting that exposed giant holes in the system — one that a committee appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court spent more than eight years studying before finally acting last week. I’m confident that our investigation sparked this long-delayed action.

Also because of the series, the General Assembly is considering legislation to better regulate guardians and protect wards.

The agreement between New York and the giant credit-reporting agencies — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion — stems from our 2012 series, which illuminated the plight of thousands of Americans who, through no fault of their own, have been harmed by flawed reports.

We reviewed nearly 30,000 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 24 states.

Our reporters made startling discoveries: an 18-year-old who never owned a credit card was in the system as having racked up $150,000 in credit-card and other debt; a woman’s credit information was somehow linked to that of a terrorist; a man was dead to the credit agencies, even though he was still ticking, yet unable to prove otherwise.

The series was replete with such examples. It was so thorough that it prompted Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine to launch an investigation with 30 other attorneys general into how the Big Three credit-reporting agencies were ignoring or mishandling consumer complaints. One result of that investigation was the New York attorney general’s agreement.

But for our ability to scour public records across the country and analyze the information, we would not have been able to reach such firm conclusions in our investigation, available online at Dispatch.com/credit.

Public records are extremely important to all of us, not just the media.

They give you access to the inner-workings of government. They can help explain why and how decisions were made. We use these records, on your behalf, to explain what’s happening and to shine a bright light on issues that need public scrutiny.

It’s why state legislators and Congress have created laws making certain records public. Unfortunately, those same lawmakers have tended in recent years to chip away at your right to know with increasing frequency.

In my view, our legislators too often cave to special interests who want to shield information from you. Or they use a mallet to address a problem that would best be addressed with a scalpel.

They forget that the information belongs to you. You pay the bills.

It’s Sunshine Week in America, the time once a year when news organizations spotlight what’s happening to our collective right to know.

The importance of public records was very obvious here this week with these two major developments. It’s worth remembering the next time someone who works for you in the legislature or Congress considers an action that would leave you in the dark.

Editorial: Blacked out, or the eroding commitment to open records across the state

Editorial by the Akron Beacon Journal

Kent State University finds itself in a familiar place, and that is not a reference to the strong performance of its men’s basketball team this season. The university has embarked on a major project, in this instance, developing a strategic vision, and it has proved less than forthcoming about the public expense involved.

Or to put it another way, a publicly supported institution is leaving the public in the dark about costs related to its strategic planning.

The university hired 160over90, a well regarded consulting firm from Philadelphia, to assist in the project. The firm won the job through a competitive bidding process. It will receive a “total project fee” of $101,750. As the services agreement with the university states, that sum does not include “incidentals” or “production media and travel costs.” Nothing wrong there; such detail turns on how the project plays out.

What is noteworthy about the copy of the agreement released this week at the request of Rick Armon, a Beacon Journal staff writer, are the items that have been redacted. Start with the “cost per unit” of the “incidentals rate card,” covering such things as copies, mileage, art supplies and “meals for working late.” In a section regarding “project slippage,” there is a reference to the “discounted blended rate” of the client, the detail of the rate redacted. The same goes for the “held capacity” fee, the amount equating to a redacted portion of the “aggregate project fee.”

The agreement states that in the wake of a public records request, 160over90 will have time to “review and redact any propriety information.” The precise time it will have? Blacked out.

This provision carries a troubling echo, the university by agreement leaving the private company to make key decisions about what will be revealed about the spending of public money. Such was the problem when this newspaper requested documents last year involving the search at Kent State for a new university president.

No company should be required to give up proprietary information. In this case, the process leaves the public without knowledge of the payment schedule, rates it is being charged or the time permitted each party to terminate the agreement, in the event of a breach.

Take one contract or project, and rationales easily surface about why information should be withheld. Then, consider the range of agreements across public institutions, and the cumulative impact of many betrayals, smaller and larger, of the spirit or letter of the state open records law. That is what has happened in Ohio in recent decades, a steady erosion of the commitment to openness in public institutions, one seemingly small concession following another.

Thus, Kent State isn’t alone, but it again has left the public without a complete accounting of how public money will be spent. That isn’t good for the concept of trust in government.

Ohio auditor's office to rule on public records complaints

From The Columbus Dispatch For the first time, Ohioans can pursue public records complaints against state agencies and public universities without filing costly court cases.

Ohio Auditor Dave Yost announced today the creation of a “Sunshine Audit” program to field complaints about governmental entities failing to turn over public records or violating other provisions of open-records laws.

Yost’s lawyers will determine if violations occurred and, if so, issue non-compliance audit findings against public employees or agencies that potentially could be enforced in court if records still are not made available.

The auditor’s office also will issue findings involving local governments and public and charter schools if those complaints were first heard by, and not resolved, by Attorney General Mike DeWine’s public-records mediation program.

“Lawsuits cost too much, take too long and are not a realistic option for the average citizen,” Yost said at a news conference outside the Statehouse.

“It’s fundamentally wrong we can have a situation in Ohio where government can stonewall” the release of records and escape accountability unless Ohioans can afford tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to pursue a lawsuit, Yost said.

Yost said he has no authority to enforce the findings of a “Sunshine Audit,” but that his office’s audits have the legal presumption of validity and would allow a person to ask a judge to order their enforcement to obtain records.

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Enquirer sues Ohio State Patrol over cruiser cam video

From The Cincinnati Enquirer The Ohio State Patrol is violating the law by refusing to give to The Enquirer a cruiser camera video of a January car chase, an Enquirer lawsuit against the police agency's parent organization alleges.

"A dash cam is the citizen's most direct view to understand and trust the work of an officer. In this case, the government can't defend why they are withholding it from the community. The law is on the citizen's side," Carolyn Washburn, Enquirer editor and vice president, said.

The suit calls for the Ohio Supreme Court to force the Ohio Department of Public Safety to release the video.

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Kent State to pay marketing consultants at least $101,750; portions of contract kept secret

From The Akron Beacon Journal Kent State University will pay a Philadelphia consulting company at least $101,750 to help the school develop its new strategic vision.

But the firm, 160over90, will likely earn much more than that because travel, production and other costs aren’t covered by the overall fee, according to the contract released Friday by the university.

University spokesman Eric Mansfield said the contract “includes redactions of information deemed proprietary by 160over90, which earned the contract by winning a competitive bid process. Kent State University is confident the company has a proven track record of success and will provide strong guidance and leadership in helping the university develop a solid strategic vision for future success.”

Kent State President Beverly Warren announced the hiring of 160over90 to the campus on Tuesday, but the school would not immediately say how much it was paying the company or release the contract. The Beacon Journal asked for the document the same day of the announcement. It was released at 4:58 p.m. Friday.

The 10-page contract notes that 160over90 had to be notified if a public records request was made for the contract and the firm would redact any proprietary information.

The agreement given to the newspaper has been redacted in several areas, including the payment schedule, how much the company charges for travel costs such as mileage and “in-flight wireless,” the amount of time it wanted to review and redact the document, and even some of the potential expenses. (A copy of the contract is available online at www.ohio.com.)

In 2014, the Beacon Journal made repeated requests for an accounting of the university’s search for a new president. However, the university signed an addendum to the search firm’s contract that gave the firm control over all records — including those that the newspaper argued should be public, such as travel receipts.

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In First Amendment victory, Blade gets $18,000 from government for detaining journalists, deleting photos

From The Blade

In what was seen as a victory for First Amendment rights, the U.S. government agreed Thursday to pay The Blade $18,000 for seizing the cameras of a photographer and deleting photographs taken outside the Lima tank plant last year.

In turn, The Blade agreed to dismiss the lawsuit it filed April 4 in U.S. District Court on behalf of photographer Jetta Fraser and reporter Tyrel Linkhorn against Charles T. Hagel, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense; Lt. Col. Matthew Hodge, commandant of the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, and the military police officers involved in the March 28, 2014, incident.

Fritz Byers, attorney for The Blade, said the settlement was made under the First Amendment Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits the government, in connection with the investigation of a criminal offense, from searching or seizing any work product materials possessed by a journalist.

“The harassment and detention of The Blade’s reporter and photographer, the confiscation of their equipment, and the brazen destruction of lawful photographs cannot be justified by a claim of military authority or by the supposed imperatives of the national security state,” Mr. Byers said.

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Package of stories, op-ed, cartoons and more coming for Sunshine Week, March 15 to 21

From the ASNE We're excited that Sunshine Week 2015 kicks off in less than two weeks!

This year is extra special as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sunshine Week and national open-government efforts that many of you and your organizations have contributed to since the 2005 launch.

A highlight of the celebration will be the unprecedented package of high-impact stories, an op-ed, editorial cartoons, a video and a graphic/timeline that The Associated Press; The McClatchy Company; USA TODAY; and Gannett Co., Inc., are spearheading. Content will be available next week for free and distributed by ASNE, AP, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Sunshine Week website.

All groups and individuals are welcome to participate and use the resources provided on the Sunshine Week website. The Toolkit section, which showcases op-eds, editorial cartoons and Sunshine Week logos, is updated daily and will have more resources closer to Sunshine Week. There are also several sources for inspiration in FOI story ideas and Sunshine Week past work.

Interested organizations and individuals should send their Sunshine Week plans and details about events to sunshineweek@asne.org.

Sunshine Week 2015 is made possible by an endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and by generous donations from Bloomberg and the Gridiron Club and Foundation.

For more information about Sunshine Week, visit sunshineweek.org. Follow Sunshine Week on Facebook and Twitter, and use the hashtag #SunshineWeek.

Ex-employee of auditor’s office wants identities of commenters on Web stories revealed

From The Medina Gazette An ex-employee of the Medina County Auditor’s Office has served subpoenas in a federal lawsuit seeking to identify her former co-workers who may have left comments on stories posted on The Gazette’s website about her feud with Auditor Mike Kovack.

In a motion to block the subpoenas, which were issued earlier this month, attorneys for the county argued the information sought in the subpoenas could create a security threat in the office.

“Disclosing the Auditor’s Office IP addresses — without any limitation on its use or any security efforts taken to protect that information — makes their network extremely susceptible to security and hacking concerns,” attorneys Kimberly Vanover Riley and Brian Spiess wrote in a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland. “IP” is a shortened version of the term “Internet Protocol,” which identifies a computer location and network.

The county’s attorneys told the court they would willing to provide the auditor’s office IP addresses but not in a document that would be open to the public. Instead, they suggested having the judge determine if the addresses matched those on The Gazette’s website.

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Editorial: Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel's meritorious call for greater transparency in JobsOhio

Editorial from The Plain Dealer As part of his laudable efforts to open up "Ohio's checkbook" to taxpayers, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel recently called for JobsOhio, the state's quasi-private economic development arm, to reveal how it spends its money.

"I believe the benefit of empowering Ohio taxpayers to see how the money is being spent there outweighs the cost of other states seeing how the money is being spent," Mandel said during a gathering last month arranged by the Associated Press.

That's a welcome embrace of transparency by Mandel, whose office recently debuted Ohiocheckbook.com, which Mandel said lists every expenditure the state makes in an easily accessible database.

Mandel said for this editorial that he wants to discuss with JobsOhio having its expenses publicly itemized like those of the state's other agencies.

JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said JobsOhio welcomes such a meeting but insisted that certain details about JobsOhio dealings must remain hidden, lest the state lose its competitive advantage attracting jobs. Englehart argued that JobsOhio already is audited privately and that its financials are posted on its website.

"We're probably the most transparent private company Ohio has ever seen and that's mandated by law," Englehart stated in an email.

And yet JobsOhio should no more be considered a "private company" than the Ohio Department of Transportation.

As Ohio Auditor Dave Yost repeatedly noted when he tried unsuccessfully to audit JobsOhio's books -- before state lawmakers barred Yost from doing so with a special law shielding how JobsOhio spends its funds -- JobsOhio should be publicly audited since part of its money is, in essence, the public's money, income derived from profits of the state's liquor monopoly.

Yost -- and Mandel -- are right. JobsOhio is wrong.

As Mandel notes, JobsOhio can show how its money is being spent without divulging the content of sensitive discussions, but, regardless, the state should always err on the side of full disclosure.

We agree. Gov. John Kasich claims JobsOhio, his signature economic development program, is better equipped to attract jobs to the state because it is run by business people. Maybe so. But those business people are spending what amounts to the public's dime. They should be held accountable to the Ohio taxpayer for the decisions they make.

Editorial: More transparency needed in charter-school reform bill

Editorial From The Canton RepositoryOhio Gov. John Kasich and both Democrats and Republicans in the General Assembly finally appear ready to reform Ohio’s charter schools, some of which aren’t performing up to our educational standards because they lack transparency and accountability. House Bill 2, which is making its way through the Ohio House, cracks down on charter school sponsors and governing boards and allows the Ohio Department of Education to step in when schools fail to meet educational standards.

While it addresses many of the problems with Ohio’s charter school system, it does not go far enough. The bill still allows charter schools to hide their use of taxpayer dollars behind the management companies that run them.

The bill was sponsored by Republican state Reps. Kristina Roegner and Mike Dovilla. It would do the following:

• Require school districts that create dropout recovery charter schools for under-performing students to include those students in annual report cards, rather than offload them to charter schools to boost district grades.

• Require the Ohio Department of Education to sign off when any charter school that receives a D or an F on its performance index and value-added academic progress scores wants to switch sponsors (known as sponsor hopping). Sponsors act to make sure the schools are running properly.

• Calls for more detailed performance expectations in the contracts between schools and their sponsors.

• Forces charter school governing board members to disclose conflicts of interest, either personal or business related, that they have with school operations.

• Prohibits school employees, and the vendors that supply the schools with goods, to sit on the charter school board.

• Only allows the governing board, and no longer sponsors, to hire school treasurers.

The bill also requires disclosure of how sponsors spend their sponsor fees — a positive — but we agree with the Fordham Institute’s Chad Aldis, who said during testimony last week that the bill should prohibit sponsors from spending those fees on anything other than oversight and technical support.

If the state truly wants to crack down on these schools, House Bill 2 and other proposed reforms need to be stronger.

Paper files public records request—and city’s response is a lawsuit

From The Columbia Journalism Review

When a newspaper requests information, there are plenty of ways government bodies can try to avoid releasing it. But the city of Billings, MT, has come up with a novel tactic: Sue the paper simply for asking.

Now, because of the lawsuit, a state judge is currently deciding how to weigh the public’s right to know against an individual’s right to privacy in a place where both are part of the state’s constitution.

Events leading up to this strange legal case stem from last spring, when someone called in a tip to the Billings Gazette, the local daily. The source suggested there might be some mishandling of public funds at the city landfill. So reporters at the paper did what journalists do: They started poking around and asking city officials about it.

According to the paper’s editor, Darrell Ehrlick, officials told reporters an investigation was underway to determine if indeed something stinky was happening at the city dump. The Gazette followed up on the progress of the probe every few weeks to see if there was anything to report. After a while—“As with so many things in government, a journalist’s timeline and a government’s are two very different things,” Ehrlick says—officials indicated the investigation was over, and the city would respond to a formal inquiry about it.

On June 26, 2014, Ehrlick filed a written public records request on behalf of his paper, asking for any record the city had related to an investigation of landfill funds or property being mishandled, misused, or misappropriated.

The timeline of events was pretty straightforward up to that point. “We thought that the process was working fairly well,” Ehrlick told CJR.

Until it wasn’t. Instead of responding to the records request, the city of Billings sued the newspaper.

The city’s argument? According to reports on the case, if the Gazette got the information it wanted, the paper would be able to determine the names of city employees who had been disciplined for their actions. Those city employees might then be able to sue the city for violating their right to privacy by releasing information about them to the paper.

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Mandel wants all public checkbooks online

From The Dayton Daily News Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel is drafting a letter to 3,900 cities, counties and school districts in Ohio offering to help them follow his lead and document every penny they spend on a user-friendly website — at no charge.

If they ignore the offer, Mandel says they can expect a phone call from his office. If they still ignore him, he plans to propose ordinances or push local governments to open their books.

“If they ignore all those things, I’m going to start showing up at city council meetings and school board meetings and I’m going to demand that these local government officials put the finances online because the people have the right to know,” Mandel said in a recent interview with the I-Team.

Mandel in December put online seven years of state transactions, giving the public unprecedented access to browse state expenditures at their leisure. State lawmakers introduced a bill this week that would require future treasurers to maintain the database, which has garnered bipartisan praise.

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Public records request reveals 'flawed' changes made before fatal bridge collapse

From The Cincinnati Enquirer Engineers had to make late changes to the demolition plan of the old Hopple Street Interstate 75 overpass after workers ran into problems tearing down the bridge the night before it collapsed – and those changes may have been flawed and caused the fatal accident.

That is according to an analysis of the demolition plan by an independent bridge expert after the Ohio Department of Transportation and Kokosing Construction released the documents to The Enquirer on Thursday.

The documents were released to the public a day after The Enquirer threatened to sue the state for withholding the demolition plan.

The documents show Kokosing engineers had to make changes to the demolition plan just hours before the bridge collapsed and killed 35-year-old construction worker Brandon Carl on the night of Jan. 19.

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Treasurer Josh Mandel says JobsOhio expenses should be public

From The Plain Dealer Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel said spending by JobsOhio, the state's private economic development organization, should be available to the public.

Mandel's office recently launched a website containing records of all state agency transactions, and he said JobsOhio, funded by bonds backed by state liquor profits, should do the same.

"I believe the benefit of empowering Ohio taxpayers to see how the money is being spent there outweighs the cost of other states seeing how the money is being spent," Mandel said during a panel discussion hosted by the Associated Press. "When we think about transparency in government, we should always err on the side of empowering taxpayers to see how the money is being spent."

JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said there might be a misunderstanding about the organization's transparency.

"We're probably the most transparent private company Ohio has ever seen and that's mandated by law," Englehart said in an email.

Englehart said state law requires the organization to publicly disclose private funds it receives and annually undergo a full review of internal compliance processes.

"We're glad to clarify these for anyone who doesn't understand them or is unfamiliar with them," Englehart said.

JobsOhio's private status has been disputed by critics, but the only legal challenge to the arrangement was rejected last year by the Ohio Supreme Court.

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State finally releases Dispatch request for oil train records

From The Columbus Dispatch Millions of gallons of some of the most volatile crude oil in North America are being transported on rail lines through Ohio each week, according to reports that the state had kept secret until this week.

The railroad-company reports show that 45 million to 137 million gallons of Bakken crude oil come through Ohio each week from North Dakota oil fields on the way to East Coast refineries.

Two million to 25 million gallons a week come through Franklin County alone.

Bakken crude oil is desirable to oil and gas companies because it requires less refining than other shale oil to be turned into diesel fuel and gasoline. It also is highly flammable.

Prompted by a 2013 train derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in Quebec and an explosion in Lynchburg, Va., last April, federal regulators began requiring railroads in May to report the average weekly number of trains carrying at least 1 million gallons of Bakken crude.

Those reports are sent to state emergency-management agencies. The U.S. Department of Transportation has said the files don’t contain sensitive security details, prompting some states, including Virginia and Washington, to make the reports public.

Despite requests from environmental groups, citizens and news outlets, including one from The Dispatch in July, Ohio would not release the reports, citing an exemption in the public-records law meant to prevent acts of terrorism.

Then this week, the state released the records to Lea Harper, managing director of the FreshWater Accountability Project, an environmental advocacy group.

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Ohio Supreme Court: Governor’s pardon does not mean criminal records can be sealed

From The Dayton Daily News

A governor’s pardon offers forgiveness but doesn’t automatically mean the offender’s criminal record can be sealed by the courts, according to a 4-3 decision issued Wednesday by the Ohio Supreme Court.

Courts lack the authority to seal these records following a gubernatorial pardon unless the person meets the legal requirements, the high court said.

James Radcliff received a pardon in 2011 from then Gov. Ted Strickland for crimes committed three decades ago in Franklin County. He wanted his criminal record sealed but the Ohio Supreme Court says for that to happen state law would have to be changed because the current statutes don’t permit offenders with multiple convictions to have their criminal records sealed from public view.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor said in the majority opinion: “Judges must respect that it is the role of the legislature to address the statutory scheme on sealing records, even in cases in which gubernatorial pardons are granted. Until the General Assembly acts, we are left with the understanding that a pardon provides only forgiveness, not forgetfulness.”

It was the second decision of the day relating to the sealing of records. The Supreme Court also ruled in a separate case that courts may unseal an acquitted defendant’s record only for reasons spelled out in statute and the courts cannot add additional reasons or exceptions.

A defendant was acquitted in 2012 of drug trafficking charges and his request to have the record sealed was granted by the trial court. But three days later the state charged him with retaliating against an informant in that first case. The court then approved the state’s request to gain access to the sealed drug-trafficking case records.

O’Connor said in the ruling that unsealing the records for that purpose wasn’t expressly spelled out in state law.

Editorial: Ohio's death-penalty secrecy is wrong and must not be allowed to take effect

Editorial from The Plain Dealer Condemned murderer Charles Warner went to his death in Oklahoma earlier this month, but not before telling witnesses to his execution what he was feeling.

"My body is on fire," he said, although witnesses reported no signs of obvious distress.

Warner was given a three-drug cocktail that killed him in about 18 minutes. The second drug administered was a paralytic, which could have prevented Warner from expressing the true extent of the pain he may have felt, claimed his lawyer.

Nobody knows for sure and Warner is dead, so we can't ask him.

Ohio has jettisoned a similar multidrug cocktail, last used to kill Dennis McGuire about a year ago in a prolonged procedure that Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Gary Mohr insists did not cause McGuire to suffer, although others disagree.

Ohio now plans to return to an old method -- a one-drug protocol, either pentobarbital or sodium thiopental, drugs the state previously used until their manufacturers declined to continue providing them for executions -- but with a significant difference: The drugs will be concocted per largely secret deals by compounding pharmacies not subject to the same oversight as regular drug manufacturers.

The General Assembly passed an ill-advised law at the end of last year that allows the pharmacies to remain anonymous for 20 years after they stop doing business with the state, and the names of others involved in the process, such as doctors, to remain confidential forever even though the law has a two-year sunset provision.

Such a law is repugnant and wrong. U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost should grant a recent request by four condemned Ohio inmates to prevent the law from going into effect in March, pending a final ruling on their lawyers' challenge to the law's constitutionality.

There is no reason -- and much peril -- in trying to shield those who prepare death-penalty drugs from scrutiny. The drugs are being paid for with taxpayer funds -- meaning those contracts should be open to public review. Nor should the state try to shield medical personnel from professional sanctions in this manner. 

This editorial board has long opposed the death penalty on moral, practical and fairness grounds. If secrecy is the only way the state believes it can carry out the death penalty, then surely it is time to eliminate the death penalty altogether.

Picture still fuzzy for Marietta-Washington County Convention and Visitor's Bureau, public records

From The Marietta Times The local convention and visitors bureau is still trying to nail down its obligations, if any, under Ohio's public records law and hammer out a policy on the matter following records requests from both Marietta City Council and a private citizen in recent months. Private nonprofit organizations such as the Marietta-Washington County Convention and Visitor's Bureau (CVB) generally are not subject to public records requests, explained CVB executive director Jeri Knowlton.

"We're not a government entity and that's where it gets a little hard for people to understand. We don't perform anything that is exclusively reserved to the public sector," she said.

But factors such as amount of government funding-which went from around $450,000 in 2013 to around $575,000 in 2014 for the CVB-and amount of government oversight can affect even a private entities' requirements under Ohio public records law. That gray area came under scrutiny as city council discussed the tourism group's budget and eventually decided to cut the portion of funding the city allots the CVB from city bed tax revenues.

The city requested and was given thorough financial records during the process, but a private citizen who asked for similar records lamented being denied his request at a Marietta City Council meeting in December.

"It's listed as a public body, subject to state audit. But in a request made by a private citizen, I was to pick up these records, I was denied this opportunity," Marietta resident David Haney told council.

Knowlton said it is her understanding that the CVB is obligated to provide records only to the city.

"We are not obligated to have public meetings and we're not obligated to have public records. However we are obligated to give records to the city, and there has never been a single request by the city that we have not fulfilled," she said.

The city had never made a records request of the CVB until this fall when they began considering a funding cut for the organization. At that time council members requested and received detailed end of the year financial statements dating back to 2009, Knowlton added.

City Law Director Paul Bertram III said he believes the CVB could fall under general public records law under a court decision that set up a functional equivalency test. The test determines to what extent a given entity functions in a public office capacity. "I don't believe the (open meetings law) applies to the CVB. I believe open records law, they do apply to them under the functional equivalency test, which is a test espoused by the Ohio Supreme Court," said Bertram.

Bertram, acting through Washington County Prosecutor's Office, is deferring to the State Attorney General's office for an opinion on the matter.

But Dennis Hetzel, executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association, said he doubts the CVB would meet all four points under the functional-equivalency test and is therefore not required to fulfill public records requests.

The four points which the Ohio Supreme Court put into place include analyzing whether the entity performs a government function, the level of government funding, the extent of government involvement and whether the entity was created by the government.

"The only point that clearly would apply is that a high percentage of their funding comes from local government," said Hetzel.

According to the CVB's tax filings, which are public record and can be found online at guidestar.org, the CVB reported $424,190 in total revenue in 2012. That same year, city records show the city alloted $393,076.70, or roughly 92 percent of the funding, to the CVB through bed tax revenues.

Even if the CVB is not subject to records requests from the general public, there are ways citizens can get some information on an agency, said Hetzel.

Tax filings are a start. In addition to the overall revenue and expenditure numbers, tax filings list a nonprofit's directors and board members and any compensation paid to them.

Additionally, any records the CVB shares with the city become public records, noted Hetzel. "My advice is go after the records the (city) is creating. Those are all public records. I would go to the (city) and ask for the bills, the emails, the communications," he said.