The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office told Loudoun Now that it would cost $600 to receive the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Agency Overview for the department for 2025 through FOIA, despite the fact that Leesburg sent the news outlet its same report via email, for free, upon request.
The Virginia Department of Health told a WTVR reporter that it stood by its near-complete redaction of a letter sent by a pharmaceutical company in February, alerting the agency of “an administrative error which caused claims to be classified and paid incorrectly. VDH claimed the redactions were supported by an exemption for proprietary information used for economic development and business retention. VDH said the blacked-out information was being used for “business purposes,” which is not part of the exemption (2.2-3705.6(3)).
The Fredericksburg School Board considered changes to its public comment period, including a common-sense directive to maintain “civility, decorum and respect,” but went further by limiting who had the right to speak. In short: only those with ties to the city.
Culpeper County citizens were surprised by the sudden termination of the county administrator — a 25-year employee — at a meeting in early March. So were two members of the board of supervisors. One said he learned of the possible action only moments before the meeting, rebuking those who pushed for it: “For you to say that’s transparent, you and I are looking at a different dictionary.”
The Virginia State Crime Commission issued a report earlier this year indicating that several law enforcement agencies were not following state law on surveillance camera footage by continuing to share their databases with other states or the federal government. The commission would not say which agencies were not complying, prompting VCOG’s Megan Rhyne to note that now “everyone is at risk of being identified as someone not following the law, and that’s unfair” to the ones doing it right.
The Fairfax County Police Department is the latest locality to encrypt some of its radio communications (scanner feeds), including its main channel. As other departments making similar moves have said, the FCPD insisted this was a safety concern: “If I were a criminal and I wanted to target individuals in Fairfax County for identity theft, fraud or scams, harassment, bullying, I could just listen to the radio and harvest that information all day, every day.” Despite this argument, departments moving to encrypted channels have identified instances of this happening over the decades that the feeds have been open and accessible to the public.
Emails obtained by The Smithfield Times through FOIA showed the back-and-forth between several members of the Isle of Wight County School Board and the superintendent over a student-led anti-ICE walkout at the local high school that was similar to student protests throughout Virginia. The exchange came two weeks before the principal tendered his resignation.
Rather than stay mum about the reasons behind the county administrator’s resignation, as most localities and school districts do, the Westmoreland County Board of Supervisors chose to tell the public what led to the closed meeting that preceded the departure, including the fact that the county has been delinquent in its payments on two Rural Development loans.
Old Dominion University told a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot that it wouldn’t say how many students responded to a survey asking them to disclose their criminal histories and that “no other information will be made available.” The survey questionnaire was prompted by the on-campus shooting by a student who had been sentenced for attempting to aid a terrorist organization.
The Martinsville city manager announced a “radical reset” of city purchasing policies, which included eliminating the use of city-issued purchasing cards. The move comes not long after a Martinsville Bulletin report on $1.4 million in p-card spending under the previous administrator’s watch.
A member of the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors said that the county’s school district should look into an ethics investigation into one of the school board members who spoke at a public hearing on the county’s proposed budget. “In substance, her comments acknowledged that the school division has received additional funding in recent years, while also asserting that the Board of Supervisors has ‘flat-funded’ the school system for the last four years,” the supervisor said. “Those two positions cannot be reconciled with the public record.”
A former Greene County supervisor has sued the county for not giving him his position on the board back when he tried to rescind his resignation from the board a few days earlier.
Accomack County’s administrator announced that they had posted online all of the comments the county received after announcing it would discontinue they county’s translator TV service, which provides access to TV signals from several Hampton Roads-area stations. The county reversed its decision in response to the public’s input.
The Chesapeake Sheriff’s Office charged a former sheriff’s deputy with three felony counts of theft/destruction of public records for allegedly asking a city jail employee to download footage of an inmate incident, which the employee sent to the former deputy, who then sent it to a reporter.
