Three Republican groups have formed a super PAC called “Crossroads Generation” and given it $750,000 in seed money in an attempt to attract the youth vote, a population that has traditionally eluded the GOP.

Announced Monday, the group was created by the American Crossroads super PAC, the College Republican National Committee and the Young Republican National Federation. Each of the three groups gave $250,000.

The organization says it wants to bring in young voters disillusioned by high unemployment and the national debt.

“Crossroads Generation aims to give a voice to a generation of Americans who are much worse off than they were four years ago,” said Derek Flowers, formerly of the Republican National Committee, who serves as the group’s executive director.

The Republican Party has not done well lately attracting young voters.

In 2008, young Americans favored Barack Obama by a two-to-one margin. Youth voters tend to favor Democratic presidential candidates over Republican candidates, though the gap was unusually large in 2008. Since 1992, the majority of voters ages 18 to 29 have voted Democrat in presidential elections, according to Surbhi Godsay, a researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), a research center based at Tufts University. 

American Crossroads has raised $28 million for the 2012 election for spending on Republican candidates. The group was created by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie. Super PACs can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions to spend on advertising.

The other two founding groups report a membership of 350,000.

The super PAC debuted a website along with a Facebook page and Twitter handle. Monday, it launched a $50,000 online campaign with ad buys in eight states targeted at young swing voters. It also plans to take advantage of the College Republican group’s presence on 1,800 campuses to promote its message.

Branded, “XG,” the splashy website asks, “Are you part of the Crossroads Generation?” and invites visitors to upload videos, photos and text stories about what it’s like being a young person in today’s economic environment.

As of late Monday, the Federal Election Commission had not posted a record of the group’s registration.

On Nov. 10, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker gave the keynote address at the annual dinner of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Phoenix with ties to the powerful, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.

“Tonight, you might say I’m preaching to the choir with a bunch of fellow conservatives,” Walker, the son of a minister, told more than 1,000 supporters that night. “I preach to the choir because I want the choir to sing. So tonight I’m asking you to sing.”

His message: Spread the word “in Arizona and all across America that we can do things better.”

The high-profile event was no anomaly. Two days later, Walker addressed students at a conference at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he was billed as one of America’s “top conservative leaders.”

Walker’s official calendars from his first 13 months in office chronicle these and scores more hours he spent building credentials with conservatives in Wisconsin and across the nation.

The governor granted more interview time to the national, conservative-leaning Fox News cable channel than any other media outlet — nearly twice as much as to his hometown newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which had endorsed him in 2010.

Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie, said the governor “has multiple media availabilities every week where he is available to answer questions from any legitimate news organization who chooses to attend, liberal or conservative.”

Last fall and winter, Walker halved his overall work schedule, but his PR time hardly changed even as he raised unprecedented millions in response to a recall campaign. Since taking office in January 2011, he has raised more than $25 million -- more than half from other states.

Prime time for conservative hosts

Fox News isn’t the only conservative-leaning outlet Walker favors. Charlie Sykes, a radio host of Milwaukee’s WTMJ, was scheduled for more interview time with Walker than any other media professional in his first 13 months in office. Sykes donated $500 to Walker’s 2010 campaign, records show.

However, Mike Gousha, a television news anchor of Milwaukee’s WISN whose work long has been respected by conservatives and liberals alike, was scheduled for nearly as much time as was Sykes.

Conservative-leaning Vicki McKenna, a radio host on Madison’s WIBA, accrued the third-most time with Walker.

Overall, five of the seven radio and TV talk show hosts with whom Walker spent the most media time are conservatives. (The seventh, Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, has said her stance “depends on the issue.”)

Sykes and McKenna didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.

Walker’s time with media was tallied using a database the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism created from Walker’s calendars.

Katherine Cramer Walsh, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the Center’s findings matched her own assessment of Walker’s strategy: “To shore up his base, spend time with his supporters, and not necessarily build bridges, compromise or reach out to opponents.”

Although politically charged radio hosts such as Sykes and McKenna are popular, their programs are heard by a relatively small slice of the population, said Michael J. Flaherty, who runs a Madison public relations firm and is a former Capitol reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal.

“Most folks don't listen to these people, but the folks who do tend to be fairly loud voices in their local communities,” Flaherty added. “It may look like the governor is talking only to himself half the time. But he’s reinforcing a message that has been multiplied many, many times by these storytellers.”

Walker faces Democrat Tom Barrett, mayor of Milwaukee, in a nationally watched election on June 5.

Distant with liberal media

During Walker’s first 13 months in office, he appeared at numerous press conferences, scheduled nearly 200 hours with media and granted interviews to at least 115 outlets. But not all media outlets had easy access to the governor.

“Gov. Walker skips interviews, does NYC fundraiser,” read a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline in January 2012 after a reporter was denied an interview. Walker was fundraising at the time for his recall election alongside Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the founder of financial services giant American International Group.

Liberal-leaning media, such as Madison’s The Capital Times newspaper and The Progressive Magazine, attended Walker’s press conferences. But they weren’t scheduled for interviews, his calendars show.

Capital Times Editor Paul Fanlund said in one instance this winter when the governor was scheduling year-end interviews with many news media outlets — a common practice — Walker seemed to single out his paper for rejection. Fanlund said Werwie told a reporter that “he personally didn’t like our editorial about his role in the John Doe investigation and he didn’t think Walker would gain anything by talking with us.”

Werwie responded by email that it was “completely absurd” to cover a single denial and supplied four rejections to a Fox News producer. “I turn down tons of requests for interviews,” Werwie said, adding that the governor has rejected media requests from “across the ideological spectrum.”

Dean Pagani, a former press secretary for Republican Gov. John Rowland of Connecticut who now covers gubernatorial issues at GovernorsJournal.com, said he wasn’t surprised Walker didn’t “waste time” talking to people he’s unlikely to persuade.

“When I was (a press officer), our job was to get as much press as possible, regardless of who was asking the question,” he said. But now, “the press secretaries are much more protective, and they want to know where you’re coming from before they let you talk to their governor.”

Governor on the go

In a single day last November, Walker flew to Wausau for a jobs announcement, hopped to La Crosse to sign two economic bills, gave a radio address and headed to his home near Milwaukee, where he gave a Fox & Friends interview the next morning.

His calendars highlight what political scientists call a key political strategy — a constant public-relations focus in a 24-hour news world.

“Scott Walker is a modern politician,”  said Geoffrey Skelley, political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “He spends a lot of time in transit, doing public relations events, talking to people and trying to promote his agenda.

“As the population gets larger and people feel less connected to government officials, it’s a way to seem like you're still in touch with the people who put you in office,” Skelley said.

Walker spent about 530 hours on PR work. His top priority appeared to be his jobs agenda, at about one-fifth of that time, according to the Center’s analysis. Time spent networking with his base and with other politicians came in second.

During his first year in office, Walker visited at least two-thirds of Wisconsin’s counties and 12 other states, plus Washington, D.C. But he bypassed much of the northern third of Wisconsin.

Spokesman Werwie said, “While some counties are harder than others to visit given his hectic schedule, (Walker) has made it a priority to regularly have events and grant media interviews in all areas of the state.”

Pagani said Walker has leveraged his national attention well. If he wins the recall election, he’ll be a conservative hero. If he loses, he’ll be a martyr who can “travel the country saying, ‘I fought the good fight.’ ”

Explore interactive graphics of the governor’s calendars at www.wisconsinwatch.org/walkercalendars.

Coming Sunday, May 20: Who got access to Walker?

The May 20th-21st NATO summit in Chicago stirred little public interest but provoked much commentary by those who obsess over Washington’s relationship with its European allies, whose economies are mostly in trouble and whose defense spending is steeply declining.

For one perspective on the summit’s impact, one can read a transcript posted by the sober, steady journal Foreign Affairs of a news conference it arranged at the summit’s conclusion for U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. In it, he describes the communique as a “quite remarkable document” that clarified the path to a withdrawal from Afghanistan and set in motion “a process” toward a reduction of tactical nuclear arms with Russia someday.

For another perspective, one can read a scorching assessment in Foreign Affairs’ scrappy junior rival — the journal Foreign Policy — by Stephen M. Walt, the former Harvard Kennedy School dean. In his familiar take-no-prisoners style, Walt archly compares the summit to NASCAR races and the Burning Man festival as the “most useless waste of time, money, and fuel” imaginable. The Afghanistan decisions were “just acknowledging a foregone conclusion,” Walt writes, and the communique’s enthusiasms for missile defenses and enhanced military cooperation were pious but meaningless.

You can pick which assessment you like more.

For those keen to learn, meanwhile, exactly what we’ve been buying in Afghanistan over the past decade, there is a brief but useful new report on that subject by Anthony Cordesman, the Pentagon’s former director of intelligence assessment who has written interestingly about the Middle East wars for decades. He graphs the flow of money and in just 13 pages draws these conclusions:

• Most funds went directly to the Afghan security forces, instead of to the country’s development.
• The aid ebbed and flowed erratically, making long-term projects hard to plan and sustain.
• The bulk of the aid has been given in the past three or four years, producing what Cordesman calls “a clear case of too much, too late.”
• There have been few if any measures of effectiveness, and no one has been able to say how much of the aid wound up in Afghani hands.

“The system,” Cordesman writes, “virtually invited waste, fraud and abuse.”

Finally, for those who are closely following the West’s confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, it may be worth tuning into an intense debate now underway between different experts over the validity of a demand by international inspectors for access to a building alleged to hold smoking gun evidence of inappropriate Iranian bomb-building.

The building is located at Parchin, just outside Tehran, in the midst of a vast ammunition and explosives factory, and the government there has so far refused an International Atomic Energy Agency visit to it, on grounds that it has nothing to do with nuclear work – the only matter over which the agency has jurisdiction. (The inspectors have been to the huge plant twice, but not to the building in question.)

The IAEA disclosed last November that another government had asserted Iran constructed a “large explosives containment vessel” there around 12 years ago to conduct experiments, possibly involving fissile materials and meant to model how a bomb would work. Its statement provoked high-pitched alarms from David Albright, a past adviser to IAEA officials who heads a Washington-based group called the Institute for Science and International Security.

In a posting on May 8, Albright and colleague Paul Brannan embraced the IAEA’s concerns about the building and claimed that satellite photos showed Iran was trying to wash away telltale evidence of its wrongdoing there. “Iran should immediately allow IAEA inspectors into the Parchin site and allow access to this specific building,” as well as explain streams of water seen in the photos obtained by ISIS, Albright wrote.

Strong pushback came this week from Robert Kelley, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. nuclear weapons program who directed key IAEA nuclear inspections in Iraq and is now a senior research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In his own posting, Kelley wrote that the containment vessel in question is evidently the wrong size to be of use in nuclear weapons development, and bluntly accused the IAEA of “risking its technical reputation on tenuous premises.” He also said the Iranian “wash-down systems” are appropriate.

“If the IAEA succeeds in visiting the site and does not find evidence of nuclear weapons activities, its credibility will be seriously damaged and it will be unable to persuasively make the case for visits to more serious sites of concern inside Iran,” said Kelley. Although they formerly worked together — Albright claims on his website that Kelley invited him to participate in an Iraq inspection — they are now poles apart. Again, you can decide for yourself who has the better argument.

This story was reported by J.J. Barrow and Trevor Aaronson for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

On Sept. 3, 2009, contract laborer Nick Revetta was killed in an explosion at U.S. Steel's Clairton Plant near Pittsburgh.  Revetta's death and the events that followed reveal the limitations of a federal law meant to protect American workers.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, which backs free-market legislation in the states, has been controversial in part because its membership includes major corporations as well as state legislators. Largely unnoticed has been the influence wielded by a third group of ALEC members: state-based think tanks. Two of those think tanks took center stage at last weekend’s ALEC Task Force Summit in Charlotte.

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center between them successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task force — all targeting public sector unions.

Goldwater representative Byron Schlomach introduced two bills, one requiring that public employees approve their state employer’s automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks every year. Another would prohibit union officials from taking paid leave from public sector jobs to perform union duties.

Michigan’s Mackinac Center sent labor policy analyst Paul Kersey to introduce three more bills targeting unions. One of those model bills is already Michigan law, requiring public sector unions to make audits of their financial activities public. Another Mackinac proposal would require public sector union members to vote on their union membership every three to five years, and a third would make it easier for public and private employees to decertify their union.

Members of the commerce task force confirmed that the five union bills were approved in Charlotte and will become ALEC model legislation if ALEC’s board of directors does not initiate a formal review of the bills within 30 days. ALEC will then likely encourage its member legislators to introduce the model bills back in their home states. Since its founding in 1973, ALEC has successfully pushed hundreds of state-based laws. According to the ALEC website, legislators introduce nearly 1,000 bills each year that are based on ALEC model legislation, and 20 percent of them become law.

Documents released by the left-leaning group Common Cause ahead of the Charlotte meeting offered an unprecedented look at the ALEC agenda. Amid heightened scrutiny, ALEC restricted press access and shortened the summit to one day. ALEC did not return calls requesting information.

A history of influence

Dozens of state-based think tanks, many of them part of a Heritage Foundation-affiliated umbrella group called the State Policy Network, have long held sway within ALEC.

“A very large proportion of the bills are sponsored by these think tanks,” says Nick Surgey, a legal associate at D.C.-based Common Cause, which claims ALEC is actually a lobbying group, not a charity. “But behind that next layer is another set of unknowns about who is pushing the think tanks’ agenda.”

Some, but not all, of Goldwater and Mackinac’s financial supporters have been revealed. In 2010, the last year for which information is available, the organizations had budgets of approximately $3.5 million each, which have been supported with grants from the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the State Policy Network — groups that also fund ALEC.

Goldwater and Mackinac are both part of the State Policy Network, which is headquartered in Arlington, Va., and boasts 59 member organizations across all fifty states. The network was founded in 1992 “at the urging of Ronald Reagan,” according to its website. The policy group is a sponsor of ALEC events and also made grants to 18 free-market organizations in 2010, including $25,000 to the Mackinac Center. In 2008, it gave $50,000 to Mackinac, and $30,000 to Goldwater.

Together, Goldwater and Mackinac draw money from twelve of the same conservative foundations, according to analysis by Media Matters Action Network.  

State laboratories

Before the union bills were approved at ALEC’s conference last weekend, some of them were sponsored in the Arizona and Michigan legislatures by ALEC members.

“Arizona is a petri dish for extreme legislation,” says John Loredo, a former House minority leader there.

The Arizona legislature has one of the largest contingents of ALEC legislators in the country. The last eight Arizona Senate presidents have carried the ALEC membership card, including former Sen. Russell Pearce, who sponsored the state’s SB 1070 on immigration, which later became ALEC model legislation and is currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court.  

Phoenix-based Goldwater advocated for a package of bills sponsored by ALEC member Sen. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, targeting public sector unions in the last legislative session, which ended May 3. The bills included the two introduced by Goldwater at ALEC to prohibit paid union leave and require employees to authorize annually automatic deduction of dues from their paychecks.

None of the bills, though, became law in Arizona. Unions and Goldwater squared off in testimony while the legislature considered the union bills. The think tank’s Nick Dranias said “collective bargaining laws threaten the very foundation of our republic,” in the Senate committee’s hearing on SB 1485, which would have ended bargaining for public employees. The committee agreed, recommending the bill for passage, but it did not come to a vote before the full legislature.

“We believe these bills are just a balancing measure,” said Goldwater President Darcy Olsen. “It doesn’t take away the voice of public employees, it just puts them on a par with the rest of the taxpaying citizens of Arizona.”

A separate bill to restructure hiring and firing practices for public sector workers did become law in May after Gov. Jan Brewer vowed to make it a legislative priority at a Scottsdale ALEC summit in 2011. Sponsored by an ALEC legislator, Rep. Justin Olson, R-Mesa,  the law allows state employers to fire public sector employees “at-will,” leaving them no appeals for termination.

Sheri Van Horsen, President of AFSCME Local 3111, said the state’s unions are considering a legal challenge or ballot referendum to overturn the law. Because it exempts public safety unions, Van Horsen argues that it is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.

Of the three model bills that Mackinac’s Kersey introduced at ALEC, only one has become law in Michigan — a provision requiring every union to post an audit of its financial activity online. The other two bills have not been introduced in the Michigan legislature.

Kersey says his model bill, the “Election Accountability for Municipal Employees Act,” would set up a schedule by which public sector employees vote on unionization every three to five years, and would require a majority of all eligible members — not just voting members — to maintain union representation.

The other bill Kersey introduced as model legislation would alter the requirement that at least 30 percent of workers in a bargaining unit approve a petition to vote on ending union representation. Kersey’s model bill would lower that requirement to 10 percent of a bargaining unit’s members and would apply to public- and private-sector unions.

The Midland-based Mackinac Center has played a central role in pushing the GOP-controlled legislature to outlaw collective bargaining for public unions, supporting Gov. Rick Snyder’s year-old “Emergency Manager” law, which has ended public sector bargaining in several cities where the state has appointed a manager. The emergency manager in Pontiac, Mich., a former Mackinac Center adviser, abrogated city contracts with police and firefighters unions last year.

Mackinac also backed Gov. Snyder’s signing of a law in March to prohibit automatic union dues collection for school employees in the state. Four of Michigan’s public sector unions filed an April lawsuit in federal court to reverse the law, claiming it unfairly singles out school employees’ unions, including the powerful Michigan Education Association. The unions also claim the law is “retribution for political speech.” Gov. Snyder signed the law just days after labor’s announcement of a ballot initiative to enshrine collective bargaining in the state constitution.

Lobbying status

The Mackinac and Goldwater centers have faced challenges from state officials, mirroring liberal groups’ national efforts to hold ALEC accountable for lobbying. Common Cause filed a April 20 whistleblower complaint with the IRS, calling on the free-market group, which files as a 501(c)(3) public charity, to register as a lobbyist and disclose how much it spends advocating legislation.  

The state-based think tanks are also under scrutiny for frequent correspondence with legislators and testimony at state capitols, and for drafting model bills like the ones both groups brought to ALEC last weekend.

Arizona’s secretary of state sent Goldwater letters asking the think tank to register last year. “We believe you’re lobbying, you should sign up,” Assistant Secretary of State Jim Drake told The Arizona Republic in January.

“I know people look at us and say this must be coordinated effort,” says Goldwater’s Olsen, “That is not how we operate. We’re not a lobbying organization, we’re not doing guerrilla warfare — we’re a think tank.”

Following the letters from the state, however, Goldwater did register some of its representatives as lobbyists.

Olsen notes that the organization wrote the language for a ballot initiative to outlaw card check and institute secret ballot elections for unions — which passed in 2010. Goldwater’s lawyers have joined Arizona in defending the law against a lawsuit brought by the National Labor Relations Board.

Michigan Democratic Congressman Sander Levin asked the IRS in March to review the Mackinac Center’s advocacy role, and evaluate whether indeed it should retain its tax-exempt, public-charity status — which, under IRS rules, allows only limited lobbying.  

Levin referenced a number of e-mails in which Mackinac advisers gave state lawmakers detailed advice on legislation that would cap the state’s health care payments to Michigan public sector employees. The e-mails concluded with a message from Mackinac’s Senior Legislative Analyst Jack McHugh, who wrote to Republican ALEC legislator Tom McMillin that “Our goal is to outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan.”

IRS officials told Levin’s office they would have a closer look at Mackinac’s tax status. In April, the think tank denied wrongdoing. “We are 100 percent confident that we have complied with all laws pertaining to our 501(c)3 status,” Mackinac’s Michael Jahr told the Lansing-area Daily Press & Argus.  

Levin’s letter notes that Mackinac Center answered “no” to the question of whether it had engaged in lobbying on its 2010 filing with the IRS. “I am concerned about the response to this question,” he wrote.

In response to simmering concerns over reported abuses, the U.S. Department of Education issued multiple guidelines Tuesday for how schools can avoid going overboard in restraining or isolating disruptive students.  

“As education leaders, our first responsibility must be to make sure that schools foster learning in a safe environment for all of our children and teachers,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement accompanying the release of “Restraint and Seclusion: Resource Document.”

“I believe this document is an important step toward this goal. I also want to salute leaders in Congress for their vigilance on this issue,” Duncan said.

Duncan said 15 principles described in the document “come down to common sense.” He called on districts and schools to consider incorporating them into written policies that make standards clear to staff and parents.

The department’s guidelines state that restraint or seclusion should never be used as punishment, and should never be used at all unless a child’s behavior poses behavior poses “imminent danger” of serious physical harm to the child or others. The principles also warn that such policies should apply to all students, not just disabled children, and that parents and staff should be informed of policies. In addition, parents should be immediately told when a child has been subject to restraint or seclusion.

Congress has wrestled over whether to adopt national standards for secluding students in rooms alone, or restraining students, which can be defined as staff holding down children or restraining them with straps or other devices. 

Although the House of Representatives passed a bill with national standards in 2010, the Senate failed to consider legislation on the floor. A similar 2011 measure went nowhere. Divisions among disabled rights groups and arguments over whether states should be left to set standards led to a stalemate.

At least 13 states do not have standards or regulations, according to detailed charts included in the Department of Education’s document. .

Ordered by Congress to investigate allegations of abuse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2009 found “hundreds of cases of alleged abuse and death related to the use of these methods on school children during the past two decades.”

“Examples of these cases,” the GAO said, “include a 7-year-old purportedly dying after being held face down for hours by school staff, 5-year-olds allegedly being tied to chairs with bungee cords and duct tape by their teacher and suffering broken arms and bloody noses, and a 13-year- old reportedly hanging himself in a seclusion room after prolonged confinement.”

Teachers and staff were often found to be untrained in restraint or seclusion methods, and some who committed abuses continued to be employed in the field of education later, the GAO investigation also found.

After the 2010 stalemate in Congress, a Washington, D.C.-based group called TASH, which promotes equal treatment for the disabled, issued its own roundup of news reports of alleged abuses in a report called “The Cost of Waiting.”

In March of this year, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released analysis of the first-ever detailed collection of schools’ reports of students being restrained or put into isolated rooms. The data required by the department was included in its 2009-2010 Civil Rights Data Collection.

After analyzing it, the civil rights office found that students with disabilities were only 12 percent of the sample but nearly 70 percent of kids restrained by adults at school. Black students were 21 percent of students identified as disabled under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, but they were 44 percent of disabled students who were restrained.

Data also showed that Hispanic students who were not disabled were subject disproportionately to isolation. While comprising 24 percent of students without disabilities, Hispanics were 42 percent, of those subjected to seclusion.

A father talks about his young son’s arrest at school and subsequent court citation, and Los Angeles’ school police chief responds to a growing controversy in a new report aired by Southern California Public Radio.

The report by KPCC radio was produced in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity. It features an interactive map showing Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools where court citations were heavily concentrated last year. The map is based on a Center analysis of records recording school police officers’ citations for students to appear in lower-level juvenile court.

Students in lower-income, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods were far more likely to be given tickets for disturbing the peace, arriving late to school or being truant and other infractions. The Center’s companion report contains additional details on the accelerating dispute over student-police interaction at schools, and federal education officials’ decision to scrutinize discipline patterns and police citations in the Los Angeles district.

Paz Oquendo, a worker at the U.S. Postal Service’s Orlando sorting facility, smelled the noxious odor first. It was Feb. 4, 2011, and the foul stench was coming from one of the large mailbags hanging near the package-conveyor belts.

She ran over to Jeffrey A. Lill, the 44-year-old shift supervisor who was monitoring the sorting from a platform, and reported the smell.

“I can’t breathe,” Oquendo told Lill. 

Lill headed toward the center of the sorting floor — an area workers call “the belly” — to investigate the odor.

Then he smelled it — a strong chemical stench he couldn’t identify. It was coming from a bag wet with a brown viscous substance. Lill looked in the wet sack and saw a broken package with tubes and wires sticking out. He remembers reading the return address with surprise: Yemen. Four months earlier, two bombs from Yemen had been sent through FedEx and UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service had alerted everyone to be on the lookout for packages coming from the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

Fearing the package was a hazard, Lill ordered the 40 postal employees out of the belly and immediately opened the large bay doors to ventilate the facility. Lill then moved the bag to a cart and pushed it for nearly half a mile to the hazmat shed.

After the package was out of the building, Lill radioed his manager to notify her of the suspicious spill. She told him the next on-duty supervisor would finish handling the incident. 

Lill’s throat burned, and the gas had given him a headache. He called his mother in Rochester, N.Y.

“I want you know what happened at the Post Office,” Janet Vieau, 64, a real estate agent, remembered him telling her. “It might be on the news.”

But the incident never made the news. In fact, USPS did not investigate the suspicious package as a security or health threat and did not report it to the Department of Homeland Security, as is the protocol.

The package, now missing, has created a mystery — and solving that mystery could be the key to saving Lill’s life. In the weeks after his exposure to the package, Lill fell devastatingly and inexplicably ill. He suffers from extreme fatigue, tremors, and liver and neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure. He has become so sick that he cannot work and now must be cared for his by mother in New York. Lill’s doctors say they have no way to treat him without knowing what chemicals were inside the package.

All the while, USPS has refused to investigate, stating through lawyers that the incident never occurred. But the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, uncovered related documents and interviewed two whistleblowers who confirm what happened on Feb. 4, 2011 — proving that USPS has refused to investigate not only the potential cause for the illness of an employee, but also what could have been a chemical weapon in Florida.

“I think they’ve just been protecting themselves,” said George Chuzi, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, who is helping Lill and his family pressure USPS to investigate. “If we’re right, they didn’t do something they were supposed to do.”

* * *

Today, Lill lives with his mother in Rochester, N.Y. In a bedroom painted blue, with lights off and curtains drawn, Lill sleeps up to 16 hours a day in a hospital bed.

“He was so vital, so energetic and so personable,” said Vieau, his mother.  “He would play basketball and the drums.”  

But now Lill is bedridden. “He can watch a DVD, and that’s about it,” Vieau said.

Within two weeks of the Feb. 4, 2011, incident, Lill came down with flu symptoms. He also had insomnia and was disoriented. “It would go away, but each time it came back, it would come back longer,” Lill said, lying in bed with thick curtains blocking out a sunny afternoon in late March — more than a year after the incident.

By June 2011, Lill’s symptoms intensified. He had lost 25 pounds from his trim frame. His liver and appendix were inflamed. He wound up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and esophagus. The next month, Lill sat in the dark in his home in Lady Lake, Fla., unable to get out of his recliner and spend time with the two teenagers under his care: his own 17-year-old son and the son of a friend under his guardianship. Lill is divorced.

In his decade of working for USPS, Lill rarely missed a day on the job. But by August 2011, he began what’s become a permanent medical leave.

The next month, Lill’s gallbladder was removed in an attempt to give him relief from his nausea and stomach pain. Days after the procedure, his symptoms returned. Doctors couldn’t explain why. By the end of September, Lill’s mother realized her son could not take care of himself anymore, and she brought him to New York.

Vieau now works in a home office next to Lill’s bedroom, constantly listening in case he is stricken with tremors. “I’ll hear things shaking,” she said. “I have to comfort him, to hold him.”

Lill’s exposure to the suspicious package is the only answer left to his unexplainable health problems. He’s seen more than two dozen doctors, including toxicologists and neurologists, and none has been able to diagnose his illness.

“Unless we know exactly what Jeff was exposed to, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Richard Aguirre, one of Lill’s doctors. “If we knew what the toxin is, we could work back and try to find a cure.”

But to this day, USPS denies that Lill was exposed to a potentially toxic package from Yemen.

In a March 9 letter to Chuzi, USPS lawyer Isabel M. Robison wrote: “A review of Postal Service records and multiple inquiries at both the Area and District levels has confirmed — as we previously indicated — that there was no hazardous spill on February 4, 2011 at the Orlando MP Annex.”

* * *

After her shift at the USPS facility in Orlando on an April evening, Paz Oquendo sat on a couch in a hotel room on International Drive. Next to her was coworker Yolanda Ocasio. At the risk of losing their jobs, Oquendo and Ocasio said USPS is lying and covering up the incident. They were there when Lill removed the noxious package from Yemen.

“I don’t understand why the Post Office won’t admit that it happened and do something to help Jeff,” Oquendo said.

In interviews with FCIR, Oquendo and Ocasio confirmed in detail Lill’s recounting of what occurred in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. FCIR also obtained a time-stamped email Lill sent to his supervisor, Cynthia Hickman, reporting the exposure to a potentially toxic substance that day. (Hickman did not respond to requests for comment.)

Why, despite paper records and two whistleblowers’ accounts, USPS refuses to investigate the incident is something of a whodunit. But it’s also a national security concern, demonstrating how USPS may not have investigated a potential terrorist attack in Florida.

In October 2010, four months before Lill came in contact with the package, authorities intercepted two packages from Yemen with bomb materials hidden inside printer ink cartridges. One was discovered in Britain aboard a UPS cargo plane and the other was found in a FedEx warehouse in Dubai. USPS briefly stopped accepting mail from the country. Yemeni police then arrested a suspect in the case, and deliveries from Yemen to the United States resumed.

But USPS being on the front lines of counterterrorism is nothing new. Since the 2001 anthrax attacks — during which anthrax-laced letters were mailed to news media and two U.S. Senators, killing five and infecting 17 others — USPS has been on alert for the next attack.

That’s why U.S. Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., wants answers about what happened in Orlando on Feb. 4, 2011. Buerkle, whose district includes Lill’s new residence in Rochester, has pressured USPS to investigate what she views as a credible report of a possible chemical weapon.

“We are not satisfied with the level of responsiveness from the Postal Service,” said Timothy Drumm, Buerkle’s chief of staff. “We want to see if the appropriate steps were taken by the Post Office, to see if the employees are safe. But since they say the incident did not happen, we can’t even get that far.”

USPS officials in Washington, D.C., and Florida declined to comment on Buerkle’s call for an inquiry and on the two whistleblowers who have come forward.

* * *

When Lill is awake and lucid, he expresses frustration that his employer won’t acknowledge the incident that may have made him so ill.

Squeezing his eyes shut, his hand trembling, Lill admitted he didn’t follow protocol for handling a spill. Rushing to protect fellow employees, Lill did not follow USPS rules that required him to put on a protective suit before handling the parcel. Because of that, he said, liquid from the package touched his skin. It was brown, syrupy and difficult to wash off.

“I wanted to make sure they got out because one employee had gotten a headache and I got mine pretty quickly,” Lill said. “If I had followed the rules, I guess we would have had a lot more people exposed to it.”

Lill has good and bad days. During the bad ones, he struggles to distinguish reality from dream. “I’ve heard him speaking Spanish in his room, to nobody,” Vieau said, referring to how her son learned Spanish while working at USPS. “Sometimes he’ll laugh and smile and gesture. But he’s not there.”

Lill’s doctors say his symptoms are consistent with exposure to a neurotoxin. To identify which neurotoxin, Lill needs USPS to acknowledge the incident, determine whether the package is in USPS’s possession or was transferred from the hazmat shed to a third-party contractor’s landfill in Kentucky, and then test its contents.

He’s hopeful that if they can find the package, he could be well again.

“I just want my health to be the way it was,” Lill said.

The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit news organization supported by foundations and individual contributions. For more information, visit fcir.org.

The school expulsion capital of California, Kern County, continues to debate whether changes are needed to reduce the number of students that are removed.  

In a May 7 opinion piece in the local Bakersfield Californian newspaper, California State Sen. Michael Rubio called for “an expulsion roundtable” to be held Friday at the Bakersfield City School District offices. Rubio’s piece touches on revelations in a Center for Public Integrity report published last December that included an analysis of California state discipline data for the 2010-2011 school year.

“According to the Center for Public Integrity,” Rubio, who wrote, “most expulsions in Kern County were actually discretionary to school district officials, such as for defiance of authority or using obscenity or vulgarity — not for "zero tolerance" violations, such as bringing a gun to school or selling controlled substances on campus.”

“Students who break a ‘zero tolerance’ rule should never be tolerated, but when relatively small Kern County is expelling more kids than huge Los Angeles County, our expulsion process should be closely examined,” said Rubio, who represents part of Kern. The county is in California’s Central Valley, and is an agricultural and oil-production center.

Rubio noted that minority students are “especially impacted.” As the Center reported in March, newly released federal data showed that black students at one high school in Bakersfield represented 15 percent of all student in 2009-2010, but 25 percent of those suspended and 29 percent of all expulsions. The statistics were collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection from Kern’s schools and later analyzed.  

“These alarming expulsion trends can be found at several schools in Kern County,” Rubio said, “so we must address this crisis head-on.”

As part of a solution, Rubio said he has co-authored a state bill that would require schools that suspend more than 25 percent of their student body or more than 25 percent of a specific minority group to enact a strategy to reverse that trend.

At least one teacher fired back at Rubio. David Richmond, a teacher at Arvin High School in Kern County, wrote a response to Rubio that was published by the Bakersfield Californian May 13.

“Although a significant majority of our students are sent to school with an understanding of basic social values, there is a significant minority that comes to school not ready or willing to learn,” Richmond wrote. “I can accept the ‘not ready,’ but I refuse, as a classroom teacher, to accept the ‘not willing.’"

“Public schools were not created to become baby sitters for lazy and indifferent students,” Richmond said. “However, if you look at the data, we spend an inordinate amount of money on 10 percent of the students who also take up significant time in the classroom.”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary in Nebraska, campaign finance watchdogs are concerned about the role businessman Joe Ricketts played in helping underdog state Sen. Deb Fischer secure the GOP nomination.

Ricketts, the founder of the Omaha-based online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade, was behind a $250,000 last-minute super PAC ad buy designed to boost Fischer’s prospects in a three-way race that also featured frontrunner Jon Bruning, the state’s attorney general, and state Treasurer Don Stenberg, the favored candidate of the conservative Club for Growth and tea party-aligned Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Thanks to this spending surge and an eleventh-hour endorsement from former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Fischer garnered more than twice as many votes as Stenberg — and beat Bruning by 5 percentage points. Her upset came after she raised only about one-eighth of Bruning’s $3.6 million haul.

If she prevails in November against Democrat Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska governor and U.S. senator, watchdogs worry Ricketts’ influence would be considerable. 

“I don't think there is any doubt Ricketts will get more access to Fischer than regular Nebraskans,” said Adam Smith, communications director at Public Campaign. “This is about electing politicians that will benefit his bottom line and the TD Ameritrade lobbyists will know they have a likely champion if she's elected in November.”

This concern is echoed by Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, which, like Public Campaign, favors campaign finance regulations.

“Washington is responsive to the people who got them in power,” said McGehee. “You know the old saying, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’? That’s the system we have.”

Ricketts’ super-sized contributions to a political group that ran ads advocating against Bruning and for Fischer are legally allowed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. Previously, individuals were limited to giving just $5,000 per year to groups that made “independent expenditures,” the Federal Election Commission’s term for messages that explicitly tell people to vote for or against a candidate.

In addition to being the long-time chairman and CEO of Ameritrade, Ricketts is the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, which is currently seeking government assistance to renovate its Wrigley Park stadium. (The team also recently benefited from $99 million from taxpayers in Mesa, Ariz., for a new spring training facility and 15,000-person stadium that will be “the western headquarters for the Chicago Cubs.”)

Nebraska’s primary marked the reemergence of the Ending Spending Action Fund, which had been dormant since the 2010 midterm elections. Ricketts is the sole individual donor to the group, having given more than $1.4 million. The conservative super PAC seeks to eliminate government spending that it deems wasteful and reduce the national debt.

Spokesmen for neither Ricketts nor the Ending Spending Action Fund responded to questions for this story.

Kim Hillyer, a spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade, stressed that Ricketts retired from the company’s board of directors last year and that his political activities were “independent of TD Ameritrade.”

Over the past decade or so, the extremely wealthy Ricketts has become increasingly active in his political giving, and he hopes to see a Republican prevail over President Barack Obama in November.

He made his first five-figure federal-level donation in 2004, when he gave $25,000 to the Republican National Committee — a group that has received more than $100,000 from Ricketts to date.

On Thursday, the New York Times linked Ricketts and the Ending Spending Action Fund to a controversial proposal to attack Obama for ties to Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright, who gained prominence during the 2008 presidential campaign for his charged sermons. (Brian Baker, the president of Ending Spending, has stressed that this proposal hasn’t been adopted and was “only a suggestion for a direction to take.”)

In this year’s presidential contest, Ricketts has taken the “anybody but Obama” mantra to heart. And with his checkbook, he has spread his loyalty.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was the first GOP presidential candidate to win Ricketts’ financial support. But in December, after Pawlenty had bowed out, Ricketts doled out the legal maximum of $2,500 to all eight of the other major GOP candidates in the field — from frontrunner Mitt Romney, the now-presumptive nominee, to dark horse candidate Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who has since been become the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee.

Notably, last December, Ricketts also gave $500,000 to the anti-incumbent super PAC known as the Campaign for Primary Accountability.

In all, records show Ricketts has given in excess of $2.4 million to more than five-dozen candidates, parties and political committees since 1999, according to Federal Election Commission records, and his wife has donated nearly $200,000.

These donations have overwhelmingly supported Republicans and conservative groups.

Attorney Stephen Hoersting, who co-founded the anti-regulatory Center for Competitive Politics, says the campaign finance reformers’ fears of Ricketts posing a threat of corruption — or having undue influence on a politician such as Fischer — are overblown.

A lawmaker, once elected, he argues, is “always more beholden to the voters who elected him or her.”

“No access Ricketts may have will be enough to persuade Fischer to get sideways with the voters who elected her,” he added. “Remember, there are super PACs on the other side waiting to scour her voting record, now and into the future.”

When members of Congress who led the effort to overhaul the U.S. health care system saw the public option slipping away, some of them suggested that a viable alternative would be the fostering of nonprofit health insurance CO-OPs (Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans) throughout the country.

I was among the many who belittled the idea. Having spent two decades in the health insurance industry, I knew how difficult it is for even the biggest insurers to establish a presence in markets where one or two other insurance firms dominate. And there are hardly any markets left where that is not the case.

The barriers to entry in any given market are so high that the only way insurers have been able to establish much of a foothold where the don’t already have a presence is to acquire one or more existing companies. Aetna became a big player in Philadelphia, for example, only after it bought U.S. Healthcare several years ago.

If you don’t have a sizable membership base, it is difficult to negotiate rates with doctors and hospitals that are as favorable as those that bigger insurers can get. If you have to pay providers more than your competitors, you will have to charge your customers higher premiums. It is almost impossible to grow your membership if you have to price your premiums higher than your competitors. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing and why we have seen such rapid consolidation in the insurance industry. And it’s why I was skeptical that start-up non-profit CO-OPs would have a snowball’s chance.

I’m happy to report that I might have been wrong. In fact, CO-OPs could be one of the sleepers in the health care reform law that truly transforms how care is financed and delivered in this country. And they could even hasten the day when the big investor-owned corporations cede the marketplace to nonprofits and move on to other ways of earning a profit.

That’s because of the financial assistance that eligible nonprofit groups are getting from the federal government — thanks to the Affordable Care Act — and also because of the approaches the groups being selected for solvency and start-up loans are taking to get their operations up and running.

To date, the Department of Health and Human Services has awarded more than $982 million in low-interest loans to 12-nonprofit groups from California to Maine to help them overcome those barriers to entry. The reform law provides a total of $3.4 billion in loans for local groups that meet high eligibility criteria, so several more prospective CO-OPs will be selected in the months ahead. We’re not talking about grants here. The start-up money must be repaid to the government — with interest. All of the CO-OPs will have to offer coverage through the Internet-based marketplaces (exchanges) the reform law requires states to establish by January 1, 2014.

If all goes as planned, every state will have at least one CO-OP. And there are reports that at least one plan already has negotiated a good rate with local hospitals by explaining how CO-OPs can help them reduce the amount of uncompensated care they incur every year by treating uninsured patients.

One of the health policy experts who is optimistic about the transformative potential of CO-OPs is Mila Kofman, former insurance commissioner in Maine who is now a research professor and project director at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.

“With seed money from the federal government, along with the subsidies moderate-income and middle class individuals and families will receive if they buy coverage through the exchanges, the CO-OPs could be significant game-changers, especially in states where the whole market is dominated by a single company.”

Kofman speaks from experience. The individual and small group marketplace in Maine was dominated by for-profit Anthem Blue Cross (a subsidiary of WellPoint) until the state selected nonprofit Harvard Pilgrim Health Care to provide coverage options for small businesses, individuals and self-employed residents through a public-private partnership called DirigoChoice — a precursor to the state exchanges — a few years ago. In 2004, Anthem had a 91 percent share of the individual market and a 68 percent share of the small business market. Five years later, Anthem’s share had dropped to 49 percent in both the individual and small business markets because of competition from Harvard Pilgrim.

“Nothing else changed,” said Kofman. “It was this private-public partnership that enabled Harvard Pilgrim to come in and open the market to more competition. And when you open the market up to competition, other companies can grow, too, which is what happened in Maine.”

Kofman said she believes there is great potential depending on how the CO-OPs are organized. She likes what she has seen so far. At least three of the 12 organizations receiving grants so far will grow out of community health centers that have a focus on providing primary care. Some others are affiliated with Medicaid managed care organizations that also have an emphasis on prevention and primary care.

“Their philosophy is very different from what most of us are used to,” she said.

It is this different philosophy that could transform the U.S. health care system, especially if the nonprofit CO-OPs — which, blessedly, will not have to devote a lot of premium revenue to satisfy Wall Street investors — live up to their potential.

An influential federal task force has finalized its view that men should avoid a controversial test for prostate cancer that was the subject of a Center for Public Integrity investigation last fall.  

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force advised men against routine prostate cancer screening using the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test because the test often leads to more harm than good. The group found that, under the best of circumstances, one man of every 1,000 given the test would avoid death as a result, while one in every 3,000 would die prematurely from complications related to prostate cancer treatment. Prostate cancer is common, particularly in older men, and often cancers discovered through screening grow so slowly that they would likely not cause harm.

The task force findings, published Monday online in The Annals of Internal Medicine, follow similar draft guidelines that were issued by the group last fall. The Preventive Services Task Force is a group of 16 primary care providers who review preventive health services and make recommendations — recommendations that are closely watched by the medical profession.   

Not everyone agrees with the findings. The American Urological Association issued a statement saying it is “outraged and believes that the Task Force is doing men a great disservice by disparaging what is now the only widely available test for prostate cancer, a potentially devastating disease.”

The current debate surrounds the value of the test, but the cost of the test to government health plans has also been the subject of scrutiny. Last fall, the Center reported that 40 percent of Medicare spending on common cancer screening procedures — including the PSA test — is probably unnecessary. Cancer screening tests are widely overused, the probe found, in part because doctors disregard scientific evidence out of ignorance, fear of malpractice suits, for financial gain or in response to patient demand.     

Early last month, lawmakers in Iowa completed work on a new open records statute. Senate File 430 creates the Iowa Public Information Board, a nine-member commission charged with enforcing the state’s open records and meetings laws.

For good government advocates in the Hawkeye State, the new legislation was cause for celebration — sort of.

Indeed, there were smiles all around as Gov. Terry Branstad signed the law on May 3 in the ornate Capitol Building, surrounded by lawmakers and journalists — many of whom spent six years on the effort. And the law is undoubtedly a victory of sorts for open government in the state, where enforcement was spotty at best, divided among several local and state entities. If a citizen’s request for information was denied, the only option was to sue — a time-consuming and costly course of action. Now, the Board can investigate complaints and bring them to court on citizens’ behalf.

It all sounds good — except for the fine print. Tacked on to the bill is an amendment that exempts “tentative, preliminary, draft, speculative, or research material” from Iowa’s open records law. Translation: a document that is part of the policy making process can be held from public view. Such language was not part of Iowa’s original open records law, enacted in 1967, and its inclusion now is troubling to some. “You can use the drafts to learn things,” said Lyle Muller, executive director of the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news service. “I think they are valuable. They give you an idea of what the early ideas were that were rejected.”

The governor’s office, in working with the Iowa Newspaper Association, inserted the amendment, hoping it would be enough of an olive branch to finally pass the bill after six years of opposition from local governments and organizations like the Iowa League of Cities. Chris Mudge, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association, said her group agreed to support a preliminary draft exemption only with an effective enforcement board in place. Her goal, she said, was to make sure the exemption remained as narrow as possible.

But that’s not the only exemption. The new board’s jurisdiction also does not apply to “the judicial or legislative branches of state government or any entity, officer, or employee of those branches, or over the governor or the office of the governor.” That leaves state agencies and local governments, mostly.

Admittedly, that’s a lot not to include. When Branstad was asked about the exemptions at the bill signing, he cited constitutional provisions that allow the legislature, the judiciary and the governor’s office to remain exempt. He did add, however, that “we want to set a good example of transparency in this office.”

Mudge admitted the final bill is not ideal. But she said she hopes that an effective enforcement board for the open records law — a rare feature among states — will make the compromises worthwhile.

“Sometimes,” she said, “you forgo the perfect for the possible.”

The good news, bad news tale from Des Moines is hardly unusual. Every state theoretically gives citizens the right to access government information. But an analysis of public records policies by the State Integrity Investigation reveals that, in state after state, the laws are riddled with exemptions and loopholes that often impede the public’s right to know rather than improve upon it.

Some states, like Iowa, exclude entire branches of government. Others protect individual lawmakers’ records and inter-office communications. Some laws are filled with hundreds of exceptions, buried in state codebooks to the point where it’s difficult to keep track of what the exceptions are and just how they got there.

It didn’t start out that way. Ken Bunting, executive director of the Missouri-based National Freedom of Information Coalition, a nonpartisan alliance of freedom of information advocates, journalists, lawyers and academics, said that most state open records laws started with a few — nine, ten, a dozen — exemptions. Several states adopted open records policies as early as the 1950s; many emerged in the post-Watergate era. Over time, the number of exemptions has grown, he said, undermining the presumption of openness.

“Getting access is more difficult than it should be,” Bunting said. “I blame some of that on the exemptions and their proliferation. But at the end of the day, it’s also about the attitudes of people in government.”

Hundreds of Exemptions and Counting

In Florida, the First Amendment Foundation, an open government nonprofit group, publishes a manual each year on the state’s open records and meetings laws. In 1985, the first year the report was published, there were 250 exemptions. Today, there are more than 1,000.

“At first it seemed really outrageous,” said Barbara Petersen, director of the Foundation and a long-time open government advocate. “But when you stop and think about the rationale, it actually benefits the people wanting access.”

Florida’s constitution states that the government can only deny access to a document if there is a specific statutory exemption, and that the exemption “shall be no broader than necessary to accomplish the stated purpose.”

In other words, the government needs to cite a reason — one specifically written in law — for denying access. Petersen said she prefers the Florida system where, ultimately, the burden is on the government to cite the exemption and explain why a request was denied.

“There’s a presumption for openness in Florida,” she said.

That’s not to say that out of 1,000 exemptions there aren’t some that are troubling to Petersen and her fellow open-government advocates. In 2011, the state carved out an exemption that mandates the withholding of video, audio, or photographs depicting the “killing of a person” except to family members. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Rachel Burgin, R-Riverview, was intended to protect families’ privacy. But Petersen said she vigorously fought this exemption, as the law also includes events leading up to and following the killing, which could potentially cover up misconduct of law enforcement officials.

The uptick in exemptions hasn’t been lost on Florida journalists. “Ten years ago, it was a lot more open than it is now,” said Dan Christensen, founding editor of the Broward Bulldog and former reporter for the The Miami Herald. He said the sheer number of exemptions in the law is telling.

“It’s better than what I hear in other states,” Christensen said. “But we’re just the best of a terrible lot.”

The Florida law, at least, requires a stand-alone bill whenever an exemption is created. “It makes it much easier to keep your eye on what they are trying to do,” Petersen said.

That’s not always the case elsewhere.

In Vermont, there are 40 exemptions clearly laid out under the state’s open records statute, which was originally passed in 1975. But that only represents a fraction of the state’s current exemptions. The balance — a number that’s been hard for journalists, lawmakers, and open government advocates to even pin down — are sprinkled throughout the entire state code. In 2007, a legislative committee identified a total of 206 exemptions. In the years since, even more have been identified — a few have been added, too — and today that number sits at around 260.

Among those discovered: exemptions for reports on air contaminant sources, locations of endangered species, criminal records of school employees, maple products dealers and processors, and the subscription list of Vermont Life magazine.

“Until recently, they’ve used any and all exemptions,” said Mike Donoghue, longtime newspaper reporter and executive director of the Vermont Press Association. “Out of the 260, they can always find something that they will try to apply to a records request.”

That was the case in 2011 when the Burlington Free Press requested information on state pensions to determine the highest-paid retirees in the state. The Treasurer’s Office initially maintained that individual pensions were exempt from the open records law under privacy protection. The paper appealed the denial and eventually won. “Up to your request we had not given out this information to people,” wrote state Treasurer Beth Pearce to the Free Press. The Treasurer’s Office did, however, notify the top 100 pensioners in the state, who were the subject of the Free Press’ investigative report, that the information was now considered public record.

In 2011, the legislature created a Public Records Study Committee — three members of the House and three from the Senate — which is meeting over the course of three years to review the more than 200 exemptions. The committee released its first report in January, which covered exemptions for tax records, health records, personal information, and university research. Among its conclusions: tax adjustment records should be made public, but academic research should not — however, it suggested a special carve-out for access to information on the treatment of research animals.

The committee proposed a public records bill this past session based on its findings to amend or eliminate some exemptions, but the measure never went anywhere. The bill was sent to the House Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Rep. Donna Sweaney, D-Windsor, who also sits on the Public Records Study Committee and co-sponsored the bill. Mike O’Grady, legislative counsel, said the House Committee was grappling with redistricting for most of the session and was unable to turn its attention to the public records proposal.

So far, the committee has reviewed about 63 exemptions. It is expected to resume meeting this summer.

Allen Gilbert, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, said most people, including the legislators involved in the study, are frustrated by the enormity of the task. “There’s an irony in this,” Gilbert said. “The core problem is one that the legislature has created by writing all these exemptions over the years.”

A ‘Black Hole’

Charles Davis, former executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, said it’s not always the number of exemptions that are troubling. He too considers Florida’s open records system to be among the country’s best — the exemptions are so specific that a record is public unless explicitly stated otherwise. What concerns him more are the states that “write exemptions so broad you can drive a truck through them.”

Among the more common — and arguably the most abused — is the “deliberative process” exemption, similar to the provision that was inserted into Iowa’s new open records bill, that allows an “out” for documents that are part of the back-and-forth of policy-making.

It’s common for states to provide such exceptions, and they can be applied — or misapplied — in any number of ways. In Illinois, any document or record in which “opinions are expressed” can be exempt. Virginia’s open records law protects “working papers.” Wyoming legislators exempted draft legislation and communication with staff and constituents up until a bill is introduced. Legislators see these exemptions as a protection of the deliberative process, as a way to shield the public from ideas that are not yet fully formed and allow for frank and open debate.

“It’s almost impossible to draw a statute that fits every situation” said Clifton A. “Chip” Woodrum, an attorney who served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1980 to 2004. Woodrum said it is important for the public to have access to its government, but raised a question about when it is appropriate to make certain documents public.

“[Legislators] need some time to go through the process of doing your own fact-finding, doing your own analysis, reaching your own conclusions,” he said. 

But advocates of public access worry about the potentially dangerous reach of such exclusions.

“There’s fear that it could become this black hole that officials could throw all sorts of information in and claim that it’s protected by deliberative privilege,” said Kathleen Richardson, executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.

For example, Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law exempts records that are part of “internal, predecisional deliberations,” including such deliberations that are part of legislative proposals, amendments, and budget recommendations.

The exemption is “designed so that agencies properly have the space to be able to discuss policies and decisions,” said Terry Mutchler, executive director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records. “You need to have an open discussion, a frank discussion, as you are making a decision.”

But the exemption is often misapplied, which Mutchler said is easy to do because of the vague language used in the provision.

“The problem is when everything is stamped as predecisional,” she said. “That’s not good.”

Melissa Melewsky of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association said the predecisional exemption is one of the most frequently cited exemptions when requests are denied, and that it is often cited alongside the noncriminal investigation exemption, including notes, reports, correspondence, and records that may reveal an investigation’s progress. “This has a really negative impact depending on how broadly the agencies interpret these exemptions,” Melewsky said.

In one example, the Pennsylvania Department of Education denied reporters access to a 2010 and 2011 forensic audit of the state’s assessment skills test, which was conducted by a contractor in response to allegations of widespread cheating in Pennsylvania schools. The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, the news agency that requested the documents, appealed the denial, which cited predecisional deliberations and noncriminal investigation exemptions. But the Office of Open Records ultimately upheld the decision — “records between an agency and an entity under contract with an agency regarding a proposed future course of action are exempt from disclosure as internal, predecisional deliberations of an agency.”

Benjamin Herold, an education reporter with the Notebook who covered the ongoing probe of alleged cheating, said the publication felt there was compelling public interest in making the documents available. “It’s tough to gauge or hold accountable the decisions of the Department of Education because that information is not available to the public,” Herold said.

Overall, Mutchler said she believes Pennsylvania has a strong system. Like Florida, Pennsylvania’s law places the burden on government to explain denials for requests. But it’s the few exemptions that can make the law seem “archaic” to some open-records advocates.

For example, many states provide protection for records that are part of ongoing criminal investigations. But Mutchler said that Pennsylvania is one of a few states, if not the only one, that allows those documents to remain shielded from the public forever.

Leaving Out the Legislature

In February, the Oklahoma Senate passed a controversial “Personhood Amendment,” which would grant embryos full rights from the moment of conception. It was expected to sail through the Republican-dominated House, but never made it that far. In April, Oklahoma House Republicans met privately in a caucus before the bill reached the House floor and killed it.

There is no way to find out how Republican leaders voted in the caucus because the entire legislature is exempt from the state’s open records and open meetings laws.

Oklahoma does not give that same level of protection to any other entity in the state. And there’s a reason that such secrecy is not allowed elsewhere in the state, said Joey Senat, professor of communications at Oklahoma State University: “it breeds corruption, incompetency, and inefficiency.”

 According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Oregon provide that sort of sweeping exemption for the legislature in law. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the legislature there is exempt from state open records law because  it’s not a state agency. And still other states provide an exemption for individual legislators (like Michigan), while other states exempt lawmakers’ working papers (South Carolina and Virginia) and certain types of correspondence (New Jersey and North Carolina).

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee, called the legislature exemption a “monumentally arrogant” move. “Legislators by and large want everything to be public, except what they do,” she said.  

Oklahoma state Rep. Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie, proposed a bill this session to remove the legislature’s exemption. But he said it was challenging to convince fellow lawmakers of the bill’s benefits.

“It wasn’t well-received by legislators who have become accustomed to a closed door, and the protection that it affords them,” Murphey said. The initiative was ultimately killed in March after a House committee hearing.

A public opinion poll revealed that a majority of Oklahoma voters strongly supported including the legislature under the state’s open record laws. Bunting of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, however, said that while polls often reveal significant majorities in favor of access, public support of open government issues is generally passive.

“It is not an issue that drives people to the ballot box, not a front burner issue,” he said. “It’s taken for granted up and until there is some bit of government information that you need to know.”

And there are practical political considerations as well. Senat of Oklahoma State said the legislature in the Sooner State exempted itself from the open records law when it was first introduced in 1985. It was the only way the bill would pass. “If it had included the legislature, the powers that be would’ve said ‘no,’” he said.

But now, Senat said, the exemption allows special interest groups to exert control out of the public eye. He said Murphey’s bill failed in part because lawmakers did not want to disclose those relationships and communications.

Davis, now an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, said he could understand exemptions from a lawmaker’s perspective. “They claim government will be more efficient, run better, be more innovative,” he said. “But really, it’s because they don’t want to [be subject to open records laws] and they’re afraid of public scrutiny. These people should put on their office clothes and go to work. They work for us.”

Previously undisclosed school police records from New York City are raising new concerns about students getting heavily ticketed for vague allegations of disorderly conduct.   

More than 70 percent of court summonses issued to New York City school students between January and the end of March this year were for disruptive behavior, according to a new analysis released by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York this week.

“The high percentage of disorderly conduct charges — a catchall category that could encompass all kinds of typical misbehavior — indicates that NYPD officers are getting involved in non-criminal disciplinary incidents,” said Udi Ofer, the ACLU New York’s advocacy director, in a statement.  The NYPD took control of school safety in 1998. Armed officers are assigned to patrol schools, along with thousands of school safety officers who are unarmed but have the authority to search and arrest students.

The ACLU’s concerns mirror a burgeoning nationwide debate over the proper role of school police, and whether officers are intervening too often in matters that used to be settled in school without handcuffs or court citations.

For example, newly released data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity showed that school police in Los Angeles have been issuing thousands of court citations each year to students, including 11 and 12-year-olds, for disturbing-the-peace offenses, including scuffles at school. 

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is scrutinizing those citations in the Los Angeles Unified School District as part of a review of discipline-policy changes that the district was required to submit to the federal office.

The ACLU’s analysis in New York found that school police officers issued court citations to 555 students between January and March of this year, and arrested 327 students. Sixty-four percent of arrests were of black students, who are only 31 percent of enrollment, prompting the ACLU to question if school police are harsher with ethnic-minority students. 

An ethnic breakdown for citations was not available.

The data analyzed by the ACLU are the third round of school-related numbers that New York City police are now obliged to release under the city’s Student Safety Act, which was approved in 2011. Public outcry over allegations of abusive police behavior in public schools has led to controversy over the role of officers.

After analyzing two previous rounds of figures released by police, the ACLU called for an audit of incidents at school that led to police involvement. The group is also urging a look into how students who’ve been cited or arrested subsequently fare in school.

In response to the ACLU’s stance, New York police issued a statement earlier this year defending the force’s record in schools and crediting officers with cutting the rate of felonies committed in schools to 801 last year compared to 1,577 in 2001, more than a decade ago. The ACLU “talks about arrests in schools but, conveniently, not crimes.” NYPC Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said in a statement. The cut in felonies, Brown said, is due to the “good work of dedicated school safety officers and police officers.”

The ACLU is also suing the New York City schools and police on behalf of students claiming excessive force, handcuffing and being arrested or locked in seclusion by school safety officers.  One of the plaintiffs was arrested by a school officer when she was in 6^th grade; she was searched, handcuffed and fingerprinted at a police precinct, according to the 2010 lawsuit, which is still pending.  

The 6^th grade girl and a classmate, who was also arrested, had drawn lines on their desks in a game and were about to erase them when an officer intervened and accused them of doing graffiti, according to the suit. 

As part of a look into Los Angeles’ citations, the Center interviewed the parents of a Los Angeles 7^th grade student who was arrested and ordered to appear in full delinquency court after a first-time scuffle at his school. He was handcuffed, taken from school and booked at a police station despite his father’s urging that school administrators handle the incident as a discipline matter. 

More than 40 percent of these citations issued in Los Angeles over the last three years were to students 14 and younger.  Juvenile judges in Los Angeles are now questioning the wisdom of summoning students to court for low-level offenses; a growing amount of research is showing that putting kids into the criminal-justice system actually increases their risk of getting into trouble and dropping out of school.

The Center found that the rate of citations issued by Los Angeles school police to students 18 and younger was about 30 a day, based on a full calendar year. That surpasses the citation rate in New York City students of about six per day, also based on a full calendar. 

With more than 1 million students, New York City’s district is the nation’s largest school district. Los Angeles’ is the second largest with about 670,000 pupils.