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The Supreme Court of Virginia issued an opinion yesterday in a defamation case brought by a frequent critic of the Suffolk School Board against two school board members. The critic — Deborah Wahlstrom — sued Judith Brooks-Buck and Tyron Riddick in their individual capacities, not as school board members. She said the pair defamed her by including in a disciplinary matter against another school board member a statement that Wahlstrom had perjured herself during her successful FOIA case against the school district a few years ago. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether Brooks-Buck and Riddick were immune from suit. The court first confirmed that a local legislative body engages in a legislative act when it disciplines one of its members, but nonetheless found that the concept of “legislative immunity” did not apply in this case because the statements about Wahlstrom were “gratuitous and nonessential to the disciplinary proceedings.” The court then found that the lawsuit wasn’t barred by sovereign immunity, either. Sovereign immunity protects government and officials from burdensome litigation, but the court stressed that the doctrine applies only when officials are acting in their official capacity, but not for intentional negligence, and not when they are sued in their individual capacity.
Read the opinion
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Courts
A Virginia appeals court has ruled that Norfolk police did not need a search warrant to access data from the city’s network of Flock Safety cameras, a decision that could influence ongoing debates about the technology’s use statewide. In an unpublished opinion released October 14, the Virginia Court of Appeals reversed a Norfolk Circuit Court decision that had suppressed evidence obtained through the cameras, which automatically record license plates across the city. The case, Commonwealth v. Ronnie D. Church, centered on whether accessing Flock data to track a vehicle’s movements amounts to an unconstitutional search under the Fourth Amendment. The lower court had ruled police should have obtained a warrant before using the system. Writing for a three-judge panel, Judge Randolph Beales said the cameras only capture license plates and vehicles in public view — information that does not carry a reasonable expectation of privacy. The court concluded the system was not comparable to more invasive tracking methods like cellphone data collection or aerial surveillance.
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Local
Warren County supervisors filled a vacant board seat on Tuesday and heard one member’s concerns about following state open-meeting laws. Supervisor Richard A. Jamieson made a presentation about the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, when FOIA allows the board to meet in closed sessions, and supervisors’ responsibility to follow the state law. The board has declined two closed sessions this year, Jamieson said: Discussions on ordinances concerning agritourism on Aug. 19 and groundwater protection on Oct. 7. In both cases, the county attorney sought a closed session under the “specific legal matters” exemption to discuss proposed county ordinances. “Today, I want to explain, from my perspective, why those closed-session requests were problematic under Virginia FOIA,” Jamieson read from his statement. “Prior to tonight, I’ve already made my reasoning clear to our county attorney and the full board in writing. “Now I’m presenting my reasoning to the public with the objective of ensuring that everyone understands how closed meetings come about and what the Virginia statute says about when they are permissible,” Jamieson said. “In so doing, I’m also intending to make sure that all of the deliberations about public ordinances, regulations and policies are conducted in public excepting only clear-cut cases that meet the FOIA closed-meeting requirements.”
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Local
Donna Fields, the latest in a string of departures this year from Surry County’s Finance Department, says her former supervisor, Finance Director Steve Morris, was “asked to resign” by County Administrator Melissa Rollins. Rollins declined to comment on the assertion. County Attorney Lola Perkins, in an Oct. 6 email to the Times, said the newspaper’s questions were “seeking information, not public records, and therefore the request is outside the scope of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act” and the county “chooses not to comment on personnel matters.” Morris, when reached by the Times on June 11, said he’d been “instructed by legal not to speak on” his departure.
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Statewide
Three data center projects did not follow through on the economic promises they made to Virginia, according to an unreleased report produced by the agency tasked with attracting private investment to the state. The companies involved promised to create a minimum number of jobs and invest a minimum amount in data center construction. In exchange, they were offered an exemption on a 6% sales tax on server equipment, a benefit that can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars even for one data center project. Virginia law shields detailed information on the amount of tax benefit received by individual data centers; however, the state does disclose the total amount of revenue lost because of the sales tax exemption across all data centers. That total was around $900 million in the 2023 fiscal year, and reflected tax write-offs given to 35 data centers.
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