Emails among Warrenton officials reveal a running conflict that motivated at least one town council member to vote to remove Frank Cassidy as town manager. The emails became available weeks after the Warrenton Town Council voted 4-3 to fire the town manager without public discussion or clear answers on why. The emails, obtained through a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request, indicate that council member Eric Gagnon viewed Cassidy as “stonewalling” the email discovery process for the Commission on Open and Transparent Government — a land use committee that the town government formed earlier this year. Gagnon, one of two council members on the commission, has argued for months that the commission and special counsel Whitson “Whit” Robinson should have unfettered access to town email records in three land-use cases: the Amazon data center, redevelopment of the Warrenton Village Center, and annexation of the Arrington development.
The Martinsville City Council has scheduled a closed meeting on Nov. 12 for the purpose of consulting with legal counsel about “threatened or probable litigation involving the city,” according to the published agenda. On Saturday, Councilman Aaron Rawls confirmed that the closed meeting was related to a complaint filed by Ferrell-Benavides with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). “I feel strongly, and have expressed emphatically, that I believe this to be a squandering of city resources,” Rawls wrote. “One concern I keep getting for our city manager is if we could get some type of outline or something concerning what we are spending and paying on legal fees with our attorneys,” said Gravely. After the meeting last week, Interim City Manager Rob Fincher explained that the Sands Anderson law firm had been contracted as the city’s attorney. “Of course, we’re getting a lot of legal fees, so I’ve got my assistant in the process of breaking those down into what the specific fees are,” said Fincher.
The items on the agenda for the monthly Capital Region Airport Commission meeting Oct. 28 focused on moving the Richmond International Airport forward to greater heights, but items absent from the agenda – the moral issue of Immigration Customs and Enforcement deportation flights and the impact of the month-long government shutdown on the federal workers at the airport – weighed on the body. The question of increased ICE deportation flights out of Richmond International Airport, ferreting off thousands of migrants from across Virginia and beyond from the private Richmond Jet Center, came up for the first time during a presentation from RIC’s state lobbyists with the firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP. ICE has not responded to questions asking for clarification on the airport operations submitted by the Citizen to the federal agency’s media relations email and its Freedom of Information Act request portal. Henrico Citizen
