FOI Blog

Meh The General Assembly adjourned with many opportunities left on the table The 2023 General Assembly adjourned Feb. 26 without a complete budget and without taking full advantage of legislation offered to make citizen access to records and meetings easier or better. There’s nothing super egregious, but there’s also not as much to get excited…

It’s Crossover Day at the General Assembly. Surviving House bills make their last bid to cross over to the Senate, where they’ll meet Senate bills headed in the opposite direction. Quite a winnowing has taken place until now. Of the nearly 70 bills that VCOG started tracking at the opening of the session, barely half…

Recently, a coach on my kid’s sports team was let go. It came as a shock to my kid (and to me), and my kid was very disappointed. This coach had been a real inspiration to my wee one and was consistently enthusiastic, upbeat and encouraging. Because I am like I am, I sent a…

Over the past several years — heck, most of the 2000s — I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to celebrate a pro-public win on FOIA issues in the Virginia Supreme Court. Much less two. In one day. Unanimously. So, pardon me if I bask in the glow of yesterday’s rulings in Hawkins v. Town of…

This post original appeared on VCOG’s Substack Newsletter, September 13, 2022   This isn’t a criticism, more of an observation: Our public institutions of higher education are technically state agencies, but they should act more like local public bodies. School districts. State agencies tend to be topic-specific. They attract the attention of specific interests because…

This post originally appeared on VCOG’s Substack newsletter, Aug. 31, 2022.   It’s not uncommon in our fractious political discourse for someone to hurl admonishments at foes that they must learn from history lest they be doomed to repeat it. But how can we know history if we can’t even agree on what history is?…

Yeah, hi, so, um, I pretty much just want to vent. Hope you’re OK with that.  There’s a lot going on in the world today and I might be processing some subconscious feelings. But it might be that yesterday I had the pleasure of doing two presentations to the constituents of Pat O’Bannon, current chair…

April 2022 was a full month of FOIA cases that were filed or decided

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press weigh in on why the Virginia Senate should reject an attempt to roll back access law passed last year

We don’t get the chance to respond to things said in committee, so……   The Senate General Laws Committee today [Feb. 23] took testimony on a bill (HB 734) that rolls back most of what was accomplished last year in the area of allowing access to some files, or parts of files, in criminal investigative records that…

This originally appeared in The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press on Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2021. Reprinted with permission Editorial: More transparency in Virginia By THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT & DAILY PRESS EDITORIAL BOARD Here’s a wish for the new year that may sound familiar to readers: Virginia’s state and local governments should resolve to be more transparent in 2022. Seems…

Why I disagree with the judge’s ruling on student COVID data & FERPA Ruling against student newspaper elevates student privacy over public health Last week a Rockingham County Circuit Judge ruled in favor of James Madison University in a case brought by the editor of JMU’s student newspaper, The Breeze, over the access to the per-day…

by John Edwards Reprinted with permission from The Smithfield Times, Aug. 10, 2021   By the time I came to know Frosty Landon in 1989 or thereabouts, he was already a legend in Virginia journalism. He had worked his way up the ladder at the Roanoke Times as an editorial writer and editor, had been…

The following is reprinted from VCOG’s Substack newsletter, July 22, 2021   I don’t even know where to start. Literally. I am typing this sentence not knowing where it will lead me, where I will end up, what I will say or what point I want to make. There is just too much swirling around my…

Amid calls for the FOIA Council to study further relaxing FOIA’s rules governing electronic meetings, VCOG has this background and this response.

The FOIA Council has a subcommittee studying fees charged for records under FOIA. It’s coming about because of a bill — HB 2000 — that was introduced in the January 2021 legislative session and then sent to the council. Watch the FOIA Council subcommittee June 14, 2021, at 1 p.m. The exact language of the…

When facing a crisis, the front door is the best approach This piece originally appeared in the Virginia Mercuy on March 9, 2021.   Where should the proposed landfill be located?   Who is the most qualified candidate to be the new school superintendent? How much did it cost to implement that program? Politic me…

Not so much ‘outright awful’: A round-up FOIA legislation in the 2021 session This piece originally ran in the Jan. 22, 2021, edition of the Virginia Mercury. If there is a silver lining to a clunky yet frenetic mostly-virtual General Assembly session, it is that there are fewer bills to sift through: 1,098 bills and…