The cancellation of a Lake Monticello town hall on Tenaska’s proposed second natural gas plant has exposed differing interpretations of Virginia’s open-meeting law and prompted the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors to consider adding a policy to its bylaws limiting how many members may attend community events together. The Lake Monticello Owners Association (LMOA) announced Feb. 10 that it was canceling a Feb. 12 town hall, where residents would have had the opportunity to question supervisors Tony O’Brien (Rivanna) and Tim Hodge (Palmyra), along with Tenaska representatives, about the proposed Expedition Generation project. The cancellation was prompted by word that a third supervisor, Chris Fairchild of the Cunningham District, was also planning to attend. “Under Virginia public meeting requirements, this would constitute a special session of the Board of Supervisors, which must be fully open and accessible to the public,” LMOA said in an announcement Tuesday evening. … “It sounds like the county attorney is erring on the side of caution,” Megan Rhyne said. “While I think there is a little more wiggle room — that they can attend without calling a special meeting, so long as they don’t talk amongst themselves — the attorney seems to want to remove the temptation for them to even be in a position where they might have that group conversation. As a citizen, I would appreciate that caution.”

Shortly before presenting a budget that calls for dozens of layoffs, Richmond Public Schools administrators notified impacted employees that their job was about to be reduced, according to documents The Richmonder obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. The 84 emails, which included 74 employee layoffs, had the names of the employees redacted but not their positions, which had not yet been publicly revealed. …At the time of his budget proposal, Kamras declined to share which positions would be impacted, a choice that drew criticism from school employees and some members of the public. Richmond School Board Chair Shavonda Fernandez (9th District) said she heard those concerns at the Board’s budget work session last week, where Board members called for the release of the positions. “We can say to [the public], ‘Just trust us that these are not impacting the inside of the classroom.’ But by us not allowing for that layer of transparency, it is not clear to the public which roles are being eliminated,” she said.

Richmond’s Circuit Court judges are just like the rest of us, said local veteran defense attorney Steven Benjamin. All seven of the judges on that bench live within the city limits as required by state law and, as a result, were “affected in the same way” as everyone else by the six-day water outage of January 2025. That could very well be the reason every one of those judges recused themselves from hearing former utilities department Director April Bingham’s wrongful termination lawsuit against Mayor Danny Avula and other city officials, Benjamin said. … Now that all members of Richmond’s Circuit Court have taken the rare step of disqualifying themselves from the case, the Virginia Supreme Court will have to appoint a judge from another locality to hear it.

A judge has ordered the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department to release body-worn camera footage that will shed more light on how city police officers assisted the Trump administration’s takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace last year. During a hearing on Wednesday, Judge Darlene Soltys of the Superior Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of journalist Marisa Kabas, who sued the District of Columbia with free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The judge rejected the city’s arguments that the recordings were protected from public disclosure and gave the government two weeks to turn them over.

The S.C. Senate reversed field this week on a bill that would exempt state universities’ payments to football players and other student athletes from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. After passing the bill 30-13 in a recorded vote on Tuesday, senators balked at giving it third and final reading in a Wednesday voice vote. The action, or lack thereof, was in response to a report in The Post and Courier that Clemson transferred school funds, as opposed to third-party dollars, into the account from which its athletes are paid, leading some senators to feel misled by school officials. “I don’t like being lied to,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey told his colleagues. “I’ve either got an incorrect article here, or I’ve got universities giving us wrong information.”

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith’s final report describing President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and allegations that he obstructed government efforts to reclaim them. Cannon lit into Smith for a “brazen stratagem”: compiling the detailed report even after she ruled in July 2024 his appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and dismissed the case against Trump and two co-defendants. The Justice Department had appealed Cannon’s decision but dropped the case altogether after Trump’s election. … The Trump-appointed judge said releasing the report now would “contravene basic notions of fairness and justice” and amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never reached a jury. It could also risk revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege and grand jury secrecy, she said.