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There is no limit to how many hours Rochester School District supervisory staffers can exchange, save for what they carry over and accrue in a given year. And they have cashed out in greater number, for more hours and more pay on average than other district employees, records show. Over the past three years, they accounted for an average $2.2 million of the district's $3 million annual payout for unused vacation.
Read the full story from the Democrat and Chronicle here.
They can pronounce you "man and wife..." evict you from your home and settle your minor legal claims. It is, by all accounts, a position with very basic judicial responsibilities.
But the WDSU I-Team has learned that – depending on where a justice of the peace serves – the financial rewards can be huge.
When fees paid to the office are considered, a Jefferson Parish man is one of the best compensated elected officials in Louisiana, taking home more money than the governor here – and in Alabama and Mississippi – and more than any other judge in the state.
Read the full story from WDSU - New Orleans here.
Documents entered into court record in the lawsuit of one prisoner on death row show that the Louisiana Department of Corrections had documents that would have fulfilled a records request made by The Lens in 2013.
The Lens, a non-profit newsroom in New Orleans, had previously requested records pertaining to the purchase and inventory of the state's supply of pentobarbital, as well as communications about the lethal injection drug. The only documents received in response to this request were ones showing that the department had purchased the drug for about $5,000. A later request also asked for records related to the expiration date of the state's pentobarbital. The state responded that it had no such records.
The department maintains that it "never intentionally withheld documents" and that a "due and diligent" search for records that met the criteria of The Lens' request had taken place.
According to The Lens, the department is in violation of state public records laws. It maintains that no statutory reason was ever given for why the documents were kept from The Lens. Its request continues to go unfulfilled more than a year after the initial request was submitted.
The Center for Investigative Reporting has uncovered more problems in Richmond, California's public housing system. Two maintenance workers, who also live in public housing, were found to have double-billed for tasks, billed for more hours than were worked and charged overtime during their regularly-scheduled shifts. Overtime paid to the two workers totaled more than $125,000 over four years.
All time sheets from the two workers were approved by the appropriate officials and it is still unclear if the two men were deliberately abusing the system.
The unsupervised spending in El Chaparral is symptomatic of a vast community aid effort with lax financial controls. A network of more than 70,000 community groups has received the equivalent of at least $7.9 billion since 2006 from the federal agency that provides much of the financing for the program, Reuters calculates, based on official government reports.
The money is part of a broad government effort called the "communal state" that steers funds to communities, primarily through an outfit called the Autonomous National Fund for Community Councils, or Safonacc. But exactly how much money passes through this system, who gets it and how it's used are largely a mystery.
Read the story here.
Some New York state officials are using private email accounts to conduct official business. One reporter at ProPublica received an email from Howard Glaser, director of state operations and a top adviser to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, regarding an open records request. This email was sent from Glaser's personal email account. But later, when the reporter filed a request for emails sent from Glaser's private account, he was informed that the state had no such records. Even after submitting the request again (this time with the email that he had received from Glaser attached as evidence) the ProPublica reporter was told that his request could not be filled.
Email records raise a host of transparency issues: What sorts of emails constitute a public record? How long should emails be retained? What constitutes official business, and when should official, rather than personal, email accounts be used?
ProPublica reported that aides to Cuomo are sending official emails from private accounts in order hide these communications from the public. This is a common tactic used by politicians to avoid being transparent, and one that, at least in New York, may be against state policy.
Cuomo had in the past pledged to "use technology to bring more sunlight to the operation of government." And policy put out by the Office of Information Technology services — signed by the governor — requires state employees to get authorization for using personal email accounts for offical business.
Still, Gov. Cuomo's office has become known for its "obsession with secrecy," according to ProPublica.
Shadow Campus: A house jammed with students, a life of promise lost | The Boston Globe
Boston, defined in large measure by the students who flock to it, allows these eager newcomers to be put at risk in overcrowded houses that serve as shoddy substitutes for modern dorms. Such illegal overcrowding is rampant in student neighborhoods, a Globe Spotlight Team investigation found, a health and safety hazard virtually ignored by city inspectors and exacerbated by local universities that have in recent years, admitted many more students than they can house.
Terminal neglect? How some hospices decline to treat the dying | The Washington Post
For more than a million patients every year, the burgeoning U.S. hospice industry offers the possibility of a peaceful death, typically at home.
But that promise depends upon patients getting the medical attention they need in a crisis, and hundreds of hospices provide very little care to such patients, a Washington Post investigation has found.
To better understand the quality of services rendered to terminal patients, The Post analyzed the Medicare billing records for more than 2,500 outfits, obtained an internal Medicare tally of nursing care in patients near death and reviewed complaint records at hundreds of hospices.
From death row to freedom: One Tennessee man’s journey | The Tennessean
As state officials makes an unprecedented push to execute prisoners — at least 10 are scheduled to die in the next two years — the implications of Paul House's life story loom over the state's death penalty system. Dozens of appeals of the murder charge against him, in both state and federal courts, failed to free him, even as he maintained his innocence and new technology ripped apart prosecutors' evidence against him.
Police used guise to gain info from Utah vets in sweat lodge feud | Salt Lake Tribune
Police at the Salt Lake City veterans hospital used a "guise" to gain information about a demonstration planned by veterans upset about changes to the hospital’s acclaimed sweat lodge, an email shows.
"VA police, under the guise of a potential participant, contacted one of the individuals listed as an organizer to gain more information," reads a Jan. 31 email from Steven Young, the director of George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Atlanta squandered jobs money: Payments made for phantom workers, useless instruction | Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As Atlantans lost their jobs to the Great Recession, the city’s workforce agency squandered emergency federal grants to retrain them, recklessly paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies that billed for phantom workers or token or non-existent training, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.
Much of the on-the-job training money ended up in the pockets of companies with ties to city insiders.
Some companies won the grants, which covered up to 90 percent of workers’ wages, for so-called trainees who already had permanent jobs and even advanced degrees. Many supposed participants never knew they were part of a job-training program at all.
Jacobson documents provide details into MCC firing | Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, IL)
Hebron Village President John Jacobson, for years, had been viewing pornographic photos and videos through his work email and forwarding them during work hours, sometimes to colleagues, before he was fired from McHenry County College in February 2013.
The new details regarding the college’s investigation came from documents obtained by the Northwest Herald last week after the newspaper challenged MCC’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request made in February.
'Dreamers' see double standard in Brewer's license ban | The Arizona Republic
Gov. Jan Brewer made sure that undocumented immigrants who are allowed to stay in the country through President Barack Obama's deferred-action program can't get driver's licenses in Arizona.
But The Arizona Republic found that undocumented immigrants whom the government is actively trying to deport have been able to obtain Arizona driver's licenses in the 20 months since Brewer's executive order. That number could potentially be in the thousands.
Big budgets, little oversight in war zones | The Washington Post
International Relief and Development has received more grants and cooperative agreements from USAID in recent years than any other nonprofit relief and development organization in the nation — $1.9 billion.
In Baghdad and Kabul, companies such as IRD were left to manage hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded programs with little meaningful oversight from USAID, according to interviews with government auditors and former IRD employees familiar with the projects.
Despite the economic downturn, which saw a 1.3 percent decrease in the median salary of American households, sports revenue at public colleges and universities increased by 32 percent between 2008 and 2013. Spending on coaches salaries increased by 45 percent.
ESPN's "Outside the Lines" took a look at the numbers and broke them down in a graphic, ranking schools by total revenue, expenses and amount of surplus.
The investigation focused on data from public schools obtained through open records requests. It is unclear whether there is a practice among athletic departments of padding expenses to obscure their bottom line. But at least some departments do give back to their schools, contributing a portion of their surplus back to the university's general fund.
By George Varney
Fredreka Schouten presented a campaign finance panel at the 2014 CAR Conference in Baltimore with fellow USA TODAY reporter Chris Schnaars and AP reporter Jack Gillum. The panel focused on different techniques for investigating political conventions and using online databases.
Schouten gets to conventions two days early, before security shows up, to scope out who is sitting where and what organizations have skyboxes.
Schouten also explained what the creation, or dissolution, of a super PAC can mean.
Politicians can get in major legal trouble for incorrect FEC filings. So while the data is vast, the stakes are high to keep it honest and comprehensive.
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More white students are walking the halls at Chicago’s top four public high schools.
At Walter Payton College Prep on the Near North Side, more than 41 percent of freshmen admitted the past four years have been white, compared to 29 percent in 2009, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of Chicago Public Schools data has found.
The increase in the number of white students fulfills the predictions of education observers that minority students would be edged out of slots at the city’s top schools as a result of a 2009 ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras lifting a 1980 consent decree that had required Chicago’s schools to be desegregated, with no school being more than 35 percent white.
Read the full story here.
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