Blogs

Last year, thanks in large part to some stirring testimony from two VCOG members, a bill that would have allowed government to sue a citizen that the government felt was harassing it with FOIA requests was sent to the FOIA Council for further study.

The discussions in those FOIA Council study committees was thorough and often impassioned. Ultimately, there was no agreement and the full FOIA Council declined to recommend any measures to the 2011 General Assembly.

McLean delegate Barbara Comstock is introducing two bills we find particularly noteworthy.

One is called the Government Transparency Act and it attempts to create a website that would allow users to search for and aggregate various information, like

An interesting FOIA bill was filed yesterday by Del. Bob Marshall. In HB1722 Marshall proposes to add a requirement that

Del. Jim LeMunyon and Del. Mark Keam have again introduced a measure to put legislators' voting histories on the legislature's website. The point is to make voting histories on bills, amendments, even committee votes, easily accessible and searchable.

Here's what the two delegates had to say in a press release issued yesterday:

Sen. Steve Martin of Chesterfield has introduced SB 812, which would prohibit the disclosure of a public employee's name when releasing information related to that employee's salary or reimbursements.

Here's what the bill says:

2.2-3705.8. Limitation on record exclusions.

The Roanoke Times wrote this editorial today saying that governments should post notices of special public meetings in the newspapers, not just on government websites, libraries or text alerts.

First, a clarification. We're talking here about those statutorily mandated public hearing meetings, like the ones held before certain zoning decisions are made, or for school redistricting, etc. We're not talking about the ordinary-course-of-business meetings of councils, boards or commissions.

I had a citizen-journalist contact me today about a clerk in a rural county who was refusing a request to copy an arrest warrant.

The warrant had already been executed and it had not been sealed (nor was there any pending motion to seal it). The clerk simply he/she would not make copies. The citizen was allowed to look at the warrant, but as soon as he started to make handwritten notes about the warrant, “they took the documents and said writing notes was copying” and thus prohibited.

Two roads cross at “The Busiest Intersection in Virginia”: Money and politics.

So says the promotional brochures for the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), the 13-year-old non-profit founded by David Poole to shine the light on political contributions and political expenditures in Virginia.

The organization, which now boasts three employees and may soon be adding a fourth, recently added data from local elections, and has already begun tracking the progress of the decennial redistricting process.

At the Virginia Coalition for Open Government's annual conference, the panel topics were very different, but there was nonetheless a common thread running through them all.

Panelists and speakers who gathered at the Capitol on Oct. 22 discussed lobbying the General Assembly, access to information on college campuses, government technology, FOIA basics and using FOIA to create prize-winning journalism.

Just about every panel or speaker at some point got around to emphasizing a common element in the access equation: our humanity.