Wednesday
February 22, 2023
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state & local news stories
VCOG’s annual conference
FOI Day — March 16
Charlottesville
Info and registration here
President of Citizens for Fauquier County Kevin Ramundo issued a response Feb. 20 to a Feb. 16 news release from Warrenton Interim Town Manager Christopher Martino regarding emails requested in a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request. Ramundo said, “The interim town manager’s assertion that the CFFC FOIA request was on ‘any subject of town business’ and was never clarified is misleading,” the CFFC said. “Clarification was provided and it should have been very clear to town officials that CFFC was only concerned about communications involving the Amazon data center special use permit.” The CFFC also argued that Martino’s press release claims that “0 emails were exchanged between Ms. Schaefer and Amazon.” That doesn’t match up with what the town attorney said during the Jan. 6 hearing, Ramundo said. When the judge asked the town attorney what the “3,000-plus emails are about,” the town attorney clearly stated at that hearing that there were communications between the “the previous town manager (Ms. Schaefer) and Amazon with regard to the proposed data center….”
Fauquier Times
Warrenton Town Councilman James Hartman arrived home from work Wednesday, Feb. 15, to find trash strewn across his yard. The garbage was, he believes, part of an ongoing effort to intimidate him because of his views on the Amazon data center in Warrenton. In recent months, he had received threatening emails, found letters stuffed into his mailbox at home and been subjected to insults on social media. People placed anti-Amazon signs in his neighbors’ yards without their permission, he said. Hartman traces it all back to the emotional and often rancorous debate over whether to grant Amazon Web Services a special use permit to build a data center on Blackwell Road in Warrenton. After an eight-hour council meeting that lasted into the predawn hours of Feb. 15, the council voted 4-3 to approve the permit. Hartman said the pressure had been building for weeks and “By the 14th, the craziness had boiled over, as far as I was concerned.” Some in the audience angrily yelled at council members during the meeting. “I don’t even have words to describe it, the ugliness,” Hartman said.“What kind of mentality is it when you think you are going to sway someone’s opinion when you treat people that way? It’s disgusting.” Councilwoman Heather Sutphin’s anger at the anti-data center “bullies,” as she called them, boiled over more than once at council meetings leading up to the vote. She said she was harassed and misunderstood. “I can’t eat in town, can’t shop in town. I’m afraid my car is going to be vandalized… I have a job to do, I have a husband to take care of.” Sutphin participated in the Feb. 14 meeting remotely because she was ill. “People have accused me of not being sick the other night,” she said. “They call me a coward and say I was afraid to face the crowd. If I try to explain what’s happening, people say I’m just ‘playing the victim.’
Fauquier Times
A Richmond police internal affairs document admits policy violations by officers during summer 2020 protests over the death of George Floyd. Officers claimed they had not been properly trained or could not remember being trained, and one officer alleged that his own colleagues pepper sprayed him in the face more than once, the document says. The report made public by the police accountability database OpenOversightVA and filed in federal district court relates to incidents on May 31, 2020, when protesters were marching over the death of Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police; those protests included property damage and items being thrown at police officers.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Charlottesville School Board veteran and University of Virginia administrator Leah Puryear was chosen on Tuesday to fill the City Council seat vacated after the abrupt resignation of Sena Magill earlier this year. The final vote in open session came after an hour-long, closed-door meeting in which the six finalists were individually interviewed. Initially, 20 people applied for the post, but a winnowing process among councilors resulted in six finalists.
The Daily Progress
In other business at its Feb. 13 work session, the Luray Council also discussed the following issues: Unanimously adopted a change to the format of future council meetings by adding a “Council Comments” section immediately after “Citizen Comments”, so that members of the council may respond to, or ask questions about, issues raised during the Citizen Comment period. Current rules dictate that council members are not to engage with citizens during the comment period.
Page Valley News
The former Windsor police officer who held Virginia National Guard 1st. Lt. Caron Nazario at gunpoint and pepper-sprayed him during a 2020 traffic stop offered a six-figure settlement 17 days ahead of the weeklong January trial that saw a jury award Nazario less than $4,000 in damages, court records show. Joe Gutierrez, who was fired from Windsor’s police force in 2021 after videos of the traffic stop went viral on social media, offered the Black and Latino guardsman $100,000 on Dec. 22 to drop his lawsuit alleging racially-motivated “false imprisonment” and “assault and battery.” Daniel Crocker, another officer named in Nazario’s suit who remains on the force, offered Nazario an additional $50,000. Nazario turned both offers down.
The Smithfield Times
stories of national interest
The National Labor Relations Board issued a decision in McLaren Macomb, returning to longstanding precedent holding that employers may not offer employees severance agreements that require employees to broadly waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act. The decision involved severance agreements offered to furloughed employees that prohibited them from making statements that could disparage the employer and from disclosing the terms of the agreement itself. The decision reverses the previous Board’s decisions in Baylor University Medical Center and IGT d/b/a International Game Technology, issued in 2020, which abandoned prior precedent in finding that offering similar severance agreements to employees was not unlawful, by itself.
NLRB
editorials & columns
“When closed sessions were the last thing on the agenda, all but the most determined were likely to go home, not knowing how long the board would be behind closed doors.”
Smithfield voters last fall made clear their expectation of a more open and accountable town government. New Mayor Steve Bowman and his colleagues on the Town Council are responding. The council’s February meeting, just the second since Bowman and fellow council newcomer Jeff Brooks were elected, was a breath of fresh air for reasons both substantive and symbolic. For starters, citizens could observe the meeting without being physically present at the Smithfield Center. The Town Council meeting was livestreamed (the internet equivalent of a television broadcast) for the first time in history, fulfilling a campaign pledge by the candidates on November’s ballot. We also commend Bowman’s push for changes in the way closed sessions are conducted. No longer will citizens be told to leave the room when the council chooses to go into closed session. Instead, the council will relocate to a different room, then return to the main room to go back into open session. The mayor also plans to move closed sessions to the beginning of the meeting. We wholeheartedly endorse the change. When closed sessions were the last thing on the agenda, all but the most determined citizens (and news reporters) were likely to go home, not knowing how long the board would be behind closed doors.
The Smithfield Times