With the state’s clean slate law now in effect, organizations and legal experts gathered Thursday on Portsmouth’s Airline Boulevard to lay out the process of sealing or expunging prior criminal convictions. … The legislation is designed to make it easier for those with some lower level criminal convictions to have more access to jobs, housing and other opportunities. Some public records advocates allege that it also unfairly limits access to what should be public information. … Any records that have been sealed can only be viewed by law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, and some employers in fields such as security or caring for vulnerable populations. Executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government Megan Rhyne said her organization is always “concerned when previous public records are taken out of the public realm.” While advancing a person’s ability to get a second chance is important, she believes “there’s value in being able to look into the backgrounds of people running for office or being put in positions of great public trust.”

A formal complaint filed earlier this month is alleging several instances of misconduct from three members of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors going back several years. The 71-page complaint was filed July 1 by three Franklin County residents who have asked to remain anonymous. It claims Franklin County Board of Supervisors Chair Lorie Smith, Vice Chair Nick Mitchell and County Administrator Steve Sandy violated state law and county policy in decisions made. “The evidence presented herein documents a consistent pattern of conduct in which significant decisions about public money and public business were made outside of public meetings; in which the agenda of the full board was controlled by two members and the county administrator to the exclusion of the remaining five; in which individual supervisors issued direct instructions to county staff in violation of the county’s own rules and procedure and the county’s administrator’s employment contract; and in which a board member with an ongoing appointment to a government-funded regional body voted on that body’s funding without making the on-record disclosure required by Virginia law,” the formal complaint read in its introduction.

A Virginia Freedom of Information Act request from a Danville resident wanting quarterly reports since January 2022 from a humane investigator came 22 days before a search warrant was executed related to forging public records. The new document — obtained by the Danville Register & Bee via a FOIA request — shows a new aspect of a timeline that ultimately led to Paulette Dean resigning from the court-appointed position amid a motion to remove her. Court documents stated it started when Dean, the executive director of the Danville Area Humane Society, told police she created the last five years of quarterly reports over a two-day period spanning May 31 and June 1. Then on June 18, the Danville Police Department received a FOIA request seeking numerous items related to the humane investigator. … On Saturday, Dean released a detailed statement to the Danville Register & Bee outlining the events leading up to the situation.

How many people are using Richmond’s parks? Decades ago, there was no inexpensive or easy way to answer that question with any degree of precision. Officials might visit sites and tally cars in the parking lot, or install turnstiles that could count the number of those who pass through. But today, a vast majority of people are carrying a handy little device that tracks their every move: their cellphone. … All of that information is available to City Hall’s Department of Parks and Recreation through a deal with Placer.ai: an Israel-based location analytics platform that collects cellphone geolocation data and sells it to a customer base that includes governments, small businesses and large corporations. Under a three-year agreement that began in 2024, city officials will have paid a total of $109,500 for access to that data by the end of 2026, according to city spokesperson Tamara Jenkins — who explained that officials are using it to figure out how best to allocate city resources. … Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, The Times-Dispatch sought data on park visitors provided by Placer to city officials. Responsive records show that, between July 2025 and June 2026, William Byrd Park saw 1.4 million visitors. Joseph Bryan Park saw nearly 670,000, while Forest Hill Park saw around 385,000.

I have filed plenty of Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests over the years. Most are routine. Some are complicated. A few are uncomfortable for the public officials who receive them. That is part of the job. Until recently, however, I had never been charged by the city of Martinsville for a FOIA request. That changed after the Brown-Edwards forensic audit. The request was not for gossip, political ammunition or a fishing expedition. It was for the documents needed to test the city’s own claim that it has repaired the financial controls the audit found lacking: the rewritten policies, purchasing-card records, travel forms, journal-entry logs, budget-amendment records, CPA recommendations and any compliance checks performed after the new rules took effect. In other words, not “tell us it is fixed,” but “show us.” The city estimated the cost at $1,318. That included 40 hours for an accounting specialist, four hours for the FOIA officer, two hours for the deputy city clerk, and two hours for the purchasing manager. City Manager Rob Fincher gave a reasonable-sounding explanation. He said the request was similar to “a year-long audit, where a team of accountants comes in and spends a few days gathering the information.” He also said much of the material “is not electronically searchable because it is stored as physical documents,” and that the city has only four full-time finance employees for all city operations and utilities. I do not doubt that the request would take work. I do not doubt the city’s finance staff is stretched thin. But that explanation is exactly the problem. … That is not transparency. That is transparency with a cover charge.

Our award for the July contest for the worst abuse of South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act goes to the Department of Environmental Services. Even though the agency seems to have backed down. Columbia’s State newspaper reports that when a Society Hill septic tank installer and county council candidate asked for information about how the agency decided it was safe for kids to attend an elementary school that was built on land that had been sprayed for decades with forever chemicals, the agency said it would be glad to answer — for $2.4 million. Seriously. … To its credit, somebody at Environmental Services apparently realized this was a problem even before the newspaper started asking questions. A spokeswoman told the paper on Monday that the bill wouldn’t be that high; by Friday, she told us that “due to any confusion the customer felt from the explanation email,” it had decided to charge nothing. How big a problem the initial projection represents depends on whether the agency was trying to hide information about forever chemical pollution so it doesn’t have to deal with it or was trying to maximize its revenue or was simply incompetent. Whatever the reason, though, it should set off alarm bells about a public information law that you could drive a truck filled with $2.4 million worth of forever chemicals through.

The U.S. Navy is taking a major step to restrict press access to information about service members by no longer releasing information about any sailor’s service history — information that has been freely offered by the service for decades. The move, which officials say is being driven by increased security threats and harassment concerns, comes amid a host of other restrictions on press access largely driven by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The restrictions, which include a policy that reporters must be accompanied by an official escort on Pentagon grounds, are themselves playing out against a backdrop of escalating tension between President Donald Trump and media outlets whose content or reporting practices anger him.