From a news release issued today....

(Disclosure: The News & Observer is active in supporting the coalition)

The North Carolina Open Government Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that educates people about their rights and supports their efforts to gain access to government meetings and records, announced today it has raised an endowment to support its Sunshine Center.

Local contributions of $250,000 were this week matched by a challenge grant of an equal amount awarded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami, Florida. This means that even in tough economic times, those committed to open government sent a strong message by establishing a total $500,000 endowment.

"Receipt of the generous Knight Foundation grant marks the 'end of the beginning' for the Coalition," said Hugh Stevens, president of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition.  "Now that our supporters have laid a firm foundation for the organization, we look forward to exploring new and expanded opportunities for promoting openness at all levels of government in North Carolina."

The Knight Foundation is a leading journalism philanthropic organization committed to funding projects that inform and engage communities. Knight's gift to the citizens of North Carolina is just one of more than a thousand journalism grants totaling $400 million since 1950. In its journalism work, the foundation focuses on the quality of and freedom of news and information, and media innovation.

"Informed, engaged communities are simply not possible if local governments fail to obey their own open records and open meetings laws," said Eric Newton, vice president of the foundation's journalism program. "Yet historically governments at all levels have cared more about promoting the ideal of freedom of information more than they have cared about making it real. That means Americans themselves must step up. That's what's happening in North Carolina."

Since establishing the N.C. Open Government Coalition in 2006 and later partnering with Elon University to create the Sunshine Center, the organization has handled almost 400 citizen calls, answered hundreds of e-mails, hosted annual well-attended state and regional conferences, and participated in the national meetings of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

The Sunshine Center is also host to the state's annual celebration of open government held during Sunshine Week. This year more than 100 supporters of open government attended activities at the Civil Rights Center and Museum in downtown Greensboro, N.C.

Since Gov. Bev Perdue ousted one N.C. Highway Patrol commander in favor of a longtime friend, Randy Glover, we've been asking whether she had helped him for much of his career.

It wasn't until late Friday, after announcing Glover had stepped down from the patrol, that Perdue confirmed what one patrol insider had been saying: that she had helped him climb the patrol's hierarchy.
Here is a history of how she and her staff have handled this question since July 1, 2010, shortly after Glover's appointment was announced:

July 2009 (from press secretary Chrissy Pearson): "I talked to the governor about whether she remembered doing any sort of recommendation for Glover. She did not."

Oct. 22: Perdue, from China in a teleconference with reporters, did not answer the question, but noted that Glover's predecessor, Walter J. Wilson Jr., had promoted him to second-in-command. She chastised us for reporting Glover's 1987 transfer for having an affair with a Harnett County dispatcher. "This is a man who is lieutenant colonel of the Highway Patrol. He had an affair nearly 25 years ago. He's married with two beautiful little daughters, and I really, really am disappointed in this kind of journalism. And did I disclose it? I will have to be very honest with you. I never once in any interview for any position ask anyone about their sexual preference, their sexual orientation or their past marital history. I didn't figure it had a thing to do with the job they could do for the people of North Carolina."

Jan. 7: On her blog, Perdue challenges our reporting on Glover. We "went too far when Dan Kane wrote, regarding a past affair by Highway Patrol Col. Randy Glover, that I 'said the affair is irrelevant when it comes to Glover's abilities to lead the Highway Patrol.' This is not true, and Kane's reporting on Col. Glover continues to be peppered with inaccuracies." We asked Pearson to name those inaccuracies. She did not.

July 7: At a news conference to announce get-tough patrol policies, Perdue provides three answers to the promotion question in the following succession:

"I don't think anybody can say who intervened when. I'll tell you what, I didn't intervene when he went from lieutenant colonel to colonel."

"Randy Glover never asked me for a thing."

"I don't intervene in promotions. I don't intervene in promotions. I never intervene in promotions."

She was responding to our report that day that a former patrol secretary, Jacquelyn Walker, said that Perdue helped Glover get promoted to first sergeant in 1995 after his name was left off of a promotions list.

All of this leads up to the statement Perdue issued Friday afternoon, a few hours after Glover stepped down: "I have offered many recommendations on which men and women deserved recognition at agencies throughout state government, including Randy Glover and other qualified troopers at the Highway Patrol."

Such recommendations are not public record under the state's personnel law. This past session, state lawmakers as part of an omnibus ethics bill approved reforms to the law that would make salary and employment histories, and dismissal letters public. But they did not accept Senate Minority Leader Phil Berger's proposal that hiring recommendations from elected officials be made public.

Pearson said Perdue intends to sign the ethics bill into law.

Former SBI agent Dwight Ransome retired earlier this year with a full pension. The Investigations blog had reported earlier that Ransome had retired with 28 years of service, short of the customary 30 years that qualifies a state employee for full retirement benefits.

Ransome's mishandling of a capital murder case led the State Bureau of Investigation to agree to a $3.9 million settlement with former death row inmate Alan Gell.

The N.C. Department of Justice initially said Ransome had retired with 329 months of service. The department later said that in  addition to his 329 months of service with the SBI, Ransome also had 13 months of leave accumulated and 18 months as a police officer in Ahoskie, bringing his total to 360 months, or 30 years.

Today's paper included the first public comments from elections investigator Kim Strach, who says her probe was not complete. She produced a report, and noted several officials she was not allowed to interview -- notations that were edited out of the final report that was made public, according to a review of both her draft and the final report.

That Strach says she was held back is important because her boss, elections director Gary Bartlett, has already written a memo saying there was no intent to commit wrongdoing by candidates, including Gov. Bev Perdue, in regard to air travel.

Asked how he concluded that, Bartlett said that it was clear to him that was the case.

But Strach, a veteran investigator, says she was not allowed to interview Gov. Bev Perdue's chief of staff and a key campaign aide, Zach Ambrose. In addition, her report showed that the Perdue campaign had methods to track flights going back to 2005. And her report showed that one major donor had trouble getting the Perdue campaign to pay attention to his requests on how to pay up.

The Perdue campaign did not properly report, and pay for, a total of 42 flights. The campaign says that was an oversight and not the result of intentionally avoiding disclosure laws and campaign finance limits.

The five-member state Board of Elections will take up the matter in coming weeks.

-- J. Andrew Curliss

Troubled nurses are skipping from state to state and putting patients at risk, according to a report that is part of a continuing investigation by the nonprofit journalism outfit, ProPublica.

One of the states involved is North Carolina.

The report examines a 24-state compact that "has allowed nurses with records of misconduct to put patients in jeopardy."

Several North Carolina examples are in the report, including one nurse who left Wisconsin under investigation that would lead to six felony chrages, but ended up working in New Bern.

“Should I have been allowed to work in North Carolina? Probably not,” the nurse said, then added more firmly, “No, I shouldn’t have been.”

Senate Majority Leader Martin Nesbitt apologized early Saturday morning for kicking yours truly out of a meeting in which lawmakers hashed out differences on the omnibus ethics bill.

Nesbitt, an Asheville Democrat, said he needed to keep the meeting closed so that lawmakers who had staked themselves out on the legislation could "walk back from the plank" and start reaching consensus.

They did, and at about 3 a.m. the legislature overwhelmingly passed the bill, which includes several measures that address issues raised in our Keeping Secrets series earlier this year.

Here's a scorecard on the three major areas raised in the series:

Salary and employment histories: The bill makes them public.

Disciplinary actions: The bill makes public dismissal letters and past suspensions and demotions of public employees, but no general opening of personnel files for those who commit on-the-job felonies.

Hiring actions: Lawmakers left this one largely untouched, though there is a provision that would provide a "general description" of promotions. But it's not likely that description will include the fact that a lawmaker or political fundraiser helped make that promotion happen.

SBI Agent Dwight Ransome has retired.

Ransome's mishandling of a capital murder case led the State Bureau of Investigation to agree to a $3.9 million settlement with former death row inmate Alan Gell.

Ransome was the lead investigator into the 1995 killing of Allen Ray Jenkins, a retired truck driver in Aulander, about 120 miles east of Raleigh.

According to a case summary by the agent's own lawyer, Ransome had decided that Gell was guilty early on, despite having statements from 17 independent witnesses who saw Jenkins alive after Gell was jailed on unrelated charges.

Ransome recommended Gell be charged with murder while failing to inform the prosecutor of a host of evidence favorable to Gell: taped telephone calls, a failed polygraph test and the 17 witness statements.

Instead, he built the case on the stories of two drug-abusing 15-year-old girls whose stories changed every time they were interviewed or testified. The two pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and testified against Gell; no one else has been prosecuted.

Gell was in jail on a car theft charge when the murder for which he was wrongly convicted occurred.

The settlement was the biggest in SBI history. The state also spent $731,062.40 to defend the lawsuit.

Problems extended beyond the Gell case. A recent external review found a host of problems with Ransome's homicide cases. His investigations seldom included relevant documents, records, timelines or other independent evidence to corroborate statements from witnesses or suspects. The reviewer, former FBI agent Chris Swecker, found that Ransome may have omitted relevant information from investigative files based on Ransome's judgment that the information wasn't relevant. It was impossible to confirm from his files whether he had provided all information to prosecutors.

In Ransome's defense, Swecker found that the files showed no evidence of Ransome's supervisors giving him any direction.

Following the settlement, Ransome was transferred to an administrative job in Raleigh and did not conduct any more investigations. He retired May 31 with 28 years of employment as a state and local employee. State employees qualify for full retirement benefits with 30 years employment.

Ransome, whose phone number is unlisted, could not be reached for comment.

Political watchdog Joe Sinsheimer has been sounding the alarm regarding investment advisers who give campaign contributions to the elected officials who award contracts to manage public pensions, so he was quick to tell us about new rules to curb the practice.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted to place strict limits on those campaign contributions to no more than $350 per election, Bloomberg reports. Investment advisers and others connected to them also would be prohibited from fundraising or steering political action committee money to those officials. Violators would be prohibited from managing those pension funds for two years.

"North Carolina invests incredible power in its state treasurer, making the office sole trustee of a $60 billion pension fund," Sinsheimer said. "The SEC decision will allow those decisions to be made without the corrupting influence of campaign contributions from money managers."

He added that the new rules help "take the sting out of the state Senate's cowardly reversal" on including the state treasurer among the elected offices eligible for public financing. The provision was dropped from an omnibus ethics bill moving through the state Senate over the past two weeks.

Former state Treasurer Richard Moore took heat for receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from employees of firms doing business with the state's pension funds.

A state Senate committee today voted to further expand the information that should be made public under North Carolina's personnel law.

They amended an omnibus ethics bill to include a general description explaining disciplinary actions behind demotions, transfers and suspensions within the past five years. The change is another significant step toward giving the public more information about the state and local employees whose salaries and pensions are supported by tax dollars.

John Bussian, a lawyer for the N.C. Press Association, of which we are a member, negotiated the additional transparency. He said that he had sought a 10-year-window, while representatives for teachers and local governments sought a three-year-window. He told the committee that the association supports the compromise.

Senate Majority Leader Phil Berger, a Rockingham County Republican, had sought to make disciplinary actions public. He accepted the provision, which was drawn up by state Sen. Dan Clodfelter, a Charlotte Democrat.

The Senate committee had already approved making salary and employment histories public, and yesterday, a state House committee passed legislation that included the same provisions. Neither chamber has yet voted in full on any personnel law changes.

The moves follow Keeping Secrets, our three-part series that found North Carolina's personnel law is among the most secretive in the nation.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a ban on so-called soft money donations in a campaign finance case that has some echoes in Raleigh, where some want to see limitations placed on the political parties.

Bloomberg cast the decision as a rare victory for supporters of campaign finance limits.

Read the New York Times' report here, which quotes an expert as saying: “This is only temporary good news for those who think the soft-money ban is an important anticorruption component of federal campaign finance law.”

A National Journal piece is here.

-- J. Andrew Curliss