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A slightly edited version of this column originally ran in The Roanoke Times, Sunday, March 13, n2016

By Megan Rhyne

Rhyne is executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

When we talk about the Freeom of Information Act, the tendency is to focus on the part of Virginia law that governs access to public records.

UPDATE: All three bills noted below were approved Feb. 8 by the committee. In the process, SB 552, which started off dealing just with law enforcement, has now been changed to prohibit the release of names in connection with salary for all government employees. 

FURTHER UPDATE: By the time it passed the House, SB 552 had again been amended to remove the reference to all employees. The bill now solely refers to the names/training records of law enforcement.

The Virginia Coalition for Open Government is pleased to announce the winners of its 2015 open government awards. The three winners represent the public, government and media, and all have worked on the same issue: access to court-case information.

An abbreviated version of this piece appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Sept. 22, the Tidewater News on Sept. 23, the Free Lance-Star on Sept.

So here's a response given by the Port Authority spokesman when asked for email sent/received by a authority board member during a one-month period:

Mr. xxxx:

Let’s clear up this so-called confusion about whether the personnel exemption (or any other exemption) is mandatory.

This “problem” arises in the context of the ABC refusing to release the results of the State Police’s investigation of the ABC officer who arrested UVA student Martese Johnson. The investigation clears the officer, but ABC is refusing to release the report.

In Portsmouth they're up in arms because the city council there voted unanimously to cut public comment speaking times from five minutes per speaker down to three minutes.

If you saw my post regarding the AG's $19,000+ estimate to fill a FOIA request, you'll be interested in this response from the AG's office, too.

The estimate in this response is for $40,000 and it suffers from the same problems noted in the previous post: a vague explanation for how the hourly salary rate was derived, and faulty logic that the exact same employees who search their records will also need to spend time reviewing their results (that is, many will have no responsive records).

If you've read VCOG's daily newsletter or VPAP's VaNews for the day (or the original sources) you've seen stories about how the Office of Attorney General said it would cost more than $19,000 to fill a FOIA request for records relating to Sweet Briar's closing. If you haven't seen the document, you can view it below.

Two things caught my eye about this response: (1) the lack of detail for the average salary of the attorneys, as well as the quoted 1,950 hours number, and (2) the faulty logic underlying the third bullet point on page 2.

There is a pretty remarkable open government story coming out of Memphis this week. It concerns a report commissioned by the city’s mayor to review the city’s public records system.

The Plough Foundation prepared the report after interviewing more than two dozen city employees, news media representatives and open government advocates.

The report makes findings specific to Memphis within the context of Tennessee’s Public Records Act and it makes several broad recommendations, with sub-recommendations under each.