A Williamsburg judge sided with a citizen seeking a settlement agreement between the city and a real estate developer. The city insisted the agreement was protected attorney work product, but the judge said it was only a contract between the parties. According to the citizen who won the case — without an attorney — informed VCOG that the city would not appeal the decisions and released the agreement. Now that he’s seen the agreement, “I don’t understand why they didn’t just provide it in the first place,” he said.
Richmond leaders refused to release financial planning documents that would show how much water bills in Richmond could increase in order to fund a water system renovation. The records are being withheld as the working papers of the mayor, who told The Richmonder that he doesn’t see much benefit in residents knowing the preliminary figures. It “doesn’t help the public conversation,” he said.
Following the announcement last month that the Southampton County School Board would form a transparency committee, the county board of supervisors said it would do the same. Like the school board’s committee, this one has been structured in a way — with only two members of the board of supervisors on it — that would not trigger FOIA’s rules for public meetings.
The Southampton County School Board voted to once again include public comments in their meeting broadcasts. Since 2023, the broadcast was cut off at public comment time, with the rationale being, “Our board does not respond to public comments, so because we don’t respond to public comments, it’s easy enough to leave the public confused or misinformed or disinformed.”
The Martinsville City Council voted to publicly release information contained within a forensic audit and workplace investigation conducted by Sands Anderson, a law firm, but only to the extent the release would not interfere with an investigation being conducted by a special investigator. The council directed Sands Anderson to determine what is appropriate to release.
Del. JJ Singh has introduced a bill directing the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to convene a study group aimed at increasing transparency around the name, image and likeness deals signed by student-athletes. The bill comes as most Virginia universities have withheld any cost-sharing agreements signed by student-athletes, claiming they are the student-athletes’ scholastic records, even though such agreements in other states are publicly available.
Despite the existence of an ordinance that’s been in city code for a number of years requiring the legal opinions issued by the city attorney’s office to the city council to be posted online, the Richmond city attorney’s office is not doing that and has denied access to the opinions requested through FOIA, citing the attorney-client and the attorney work product exemptions. An assistant city attorney faulted the FOIA request for not being specific because “nearly any kind of record on any subject could potentially contain a legal opinion.”
A Richmond resident gave The Washington Post over nearly 1,000 pages of text messages he obtained through FOIA that reveal the behind-the-scenes communications among members of the Board of Visitors about a variety of hot-button issues.
The Warren County Board of Supervisors considered new meeting policies and procedures at a January meeting. The board decided not to adopt Robert’s Rules of Order as their governing parliamentary procedures. The board’s attorney pointed out that parts of Robert’s Rules of Order do not comply with Virginia’s FOIA, including some closed-meeting provisions. Later that month, the county’s administrator quit after just four months on the job and taking with him a $113,000 severance. One board member asked that some of the discussion surrounding the departure and the payout be discussed publicly, but he was outvoted and the conversation took place in closed session.
Warrenton’s special counsel resigned, in part because of a disagreement with a city council member over how town emails would be searched. The former wanted to use artificial intelligence tools, while the latter wanted to use Boolean search tools.
The Botetourt County Circuit Court judge who said last month that FOIA’s exemption for certain trade secret and proprietary information did not apply to Google’s disclosure to the Western Virginia Water Authority about how much water the tech giant was expected to use said this month that unless the agency receives an emergency stay from the Virginia Court of Appeals, they would have to release the records to the Roanoke Rambler.
One Lynchburg City Council member filed a FOIA petition against another city council member accusing the latter of providing inadequate responses to his request for records. He says he asked for “any written record and audio recordings” of a December council closed-meeting session and was given a fully redacted handwritten note, and a one-hour audio recording with “a continuous redaction tone” for nearly the entire recording.
Several speakers at a Blacksburg Town Council meeting complained about the process for filling a seat made vacant by a former member’s conviction for election fraud. Citizens said they would have liked to know who — other than the two finalists — applied. The town attorney said they are not required to publicly disclose the full list of applicants.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality launched a website to track the wetlands credits public and private developers are required to pay to offset their projects’ encroachment into protected wetlands and streams.
Without adding it to the agenda ahead of its Jan. 12 meeting, a Mineral Town Council member made a motion at the meeting’s opening to fire the town manager.
The Augusta County Board of Supervisors sparred over how the meeting minutes should reflect its decision to reimburse more than $50,000 in legal fees for two sheriff’s deputies who faced charges over separate incidents. One board member said both entered Alford pleas, which is not the same as being found innocent.
Seven months after its last invoice, the law firm representing Richmond in its former FOIA officer’s whistleblower lawsuit finally submitted a slew of bills. The total due to the firm has now reached $633,000 for the case, which originally sought $250,000 in damages.
Using the location data Flock was required to turn over in response to a judge’s ruling in a Norfolk case last month, a Christopher Newport University professor found that the cameras in the region are highly concentrated in majority Black communities and high-poverty areas.
Richmond Public Schools released its budget proposal for next year that included the elimination of 46 jobs from the division’s central office. However, RPS said it could not “share specific titles, as that would be personally identifiable.”
After filing more than 50 FOIA requests with law enforcement agencies across the state, the Legal Aid Justice Center found that there were at least 32 active so-called 287(g) agreements between immigration enforcement and police departments.
The Prince William County police department switched all of its radio communications to encrypted channels, joining a rising tide of similar decisions in Virginia and nationwide. A spokesperson for the department said encryption was necessary for the safety of police officers: “[T]here is currently no way to decipher between someone listening to the transmissions for good reasons versus those with nefarious intentions.”
The Northern Virginia Daily used FOIA to get the 1,356 comments emailed to the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority about what to do with the Shenandoah Valley’s dormant rail corridor. While business interests want to pursue a rail-with-trail plan with the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a majority of comments supported a trail-only conversion.
