ARLINGTON The “Arlington way,” a description that’s often used to promote the county’s open-government policies, got a bit tarnished in the heated fight over a possible stadium site to woo professional baseball back to the metropolitan Washington area. After talking individually with board members to get their views, county board chairman Paul Ferguson asked the stadium authority to take Arlington sites off its list. Virginians for Baseball protested it was being shut down behind closed doors. Backers previously had been promised that no decision would be made without “an extensive public review process.”
AUGUSTA COUNTY Although the requirement has existed in FOIA for several years, the board of supervisors apparently heard just recently that it was supposed to disclose its agenda packets publicly at the same time they’re distributed to members. “Policy” had been not to release agendas until the day of a meeting “so that the information wouldn’t end up in the press before they meet.” With just a whiff of sarcasm, the Augusta Free Press commented, “The information (is now) available for public perusal (five) days before the meeting. Meaning you could, if you wanted to, study up on the issues at the same time as members of the city council itself. What a concept.”
BERRYVILLE After the school board gave just two days’ notice for a “special” meeting (to talk about a new school), Clarke County resident Christopher Bates went to court. Because the notice went only to two local newspapers and was not posted at the local clerk’s office or at government Web sites, Bates wanted the board fined for violating FOIA and enjoined from repeating the violation. But Circuit Judge John R. Prosser ruled that FOIA’s notice requirements for special meetings need only be “reasonable under the circumstances.” Any violation of FOIA, he said, was not “willful, knowing, intentional,” demanding punishment or a fine. He did admonish the school board, however, “to be keenly aware that the public is interested in these things.”
DANVILLE — Danville-Pittsylvania Community Services went to court to try to block release of a report that said it neglected a mentally ill client. The report got disclosed anyway. “The media has predictably had a field day’ of speculation,” the agency complained. The Virginia Office for Protection and Advocacy said it had a well-established federal right to conduct investigations and publish the results of those investigations. The mentally ill client told the Times-Dispatch in a 2001 interview that he had been “very agitated” and was starting to “lose (his) grip” in early December, after a DPCS psychiatrist cut off his prescription to an anti-psychotic drug.
GALAX After Grayson County employees got a raise, the constitutional officers and their employees asked for equal treatment. A retroactive raise followed, but only after an illegal 45-minute closed session with the treasurer and revenue commissioner. Open-meeting laws allow (but do not require) closed sessions to talk about an individual employee’s job performance; prohibited are broad discussions of pay scales for entire public-employee groups. Maybe they were all discussing if the prosecutor and the sheriff, both absent, merited a raise? As the Galax Gazette said editorially: “Closed sessions are not intended to keep matters that could be construed as controversial out of the public eye. Such sessions can too easily be misused to keep the public from becoming aware of what is taking place until it’s almost too late to offer any opinion.”
HAMPTON ROADS A little-known group called the Chief Administrative Officers slammed its doors shut to talk about what projects should be in their region’s long-range road-building plans and how they should be paid for. As a subcommittee of the Planning District Commission, the group was a public entity required to meet in public, although Virginia Beach City Manager James K. Spore insisted the group was outside the reach of the open meeting laws. Legal issues aside, Sen. Marty Williams, R-Newport News, called it a public-policy disaster; “The process has got to open up. People are not going to trust us behind closed doors.” Little wonder, said critics, that less than a year earlier the region voted 2-1 against a sales tax increase to pay for large transportation construction projects.
LEESBURG The town’s technology director (annual salary: $92,685) was arrested Sept. 27 for charging thousands of dollars’ worth of “dating and escort service” bills to a town credit card. But when the alleged misuse first surfaced, the county prosecutor tried to keep the town from disclosing any of its credit card records. Town Attorney Bill Donnelly disagreed, arguing they were public records that anybody could obtain. FOI Advisory Council’s Maria Everett sided with Donnelly, saying FOIA exemptions for police investigations could not be used as a blanket to cover every credit card record, “absent a showing” release would jeopardize efforts to resolve the pending case.
LEESBURG Mayor Kristen Umstattd got elected on an open-government platform. But after a gang-related stabbing went unreported for more than three months, she told a reporter that police were not “legally obligated” to report crimes. The commonwealth’s attorney disagreed, saying the police have a duty to report crimes. The unreported stabbing occurred at a time of intense scrutiny over gang activity in Loudoun County. It wasn’t listed in the police department’s routine crime report or on the town’s electronic alert system, which notifies subscribers by cell phone, pager and e-mail about crime information, including wanted and missing persons. Nor did the department list the crime among its daily incident reports on its Web site. The police chief, blaming the omission on a clerical error, later apologized; the mayor kept insisting the police department could refuse to issue any crime information although she said the public would not be well-served by such a practice. (FOIA requires disclosure of felony crimes upon request; many localities also disclose misdemeanors.)
LOUISA COUNTY When local governments start squabbling, not even FOIA can help a public official sometimes. The Goochland Gazette commented, “First of all, it’s almost absurd the Board of Supervisors must submit questions in writing to its own school board. Secondly, the refusal to answer, especially on the grounds of FOIA guidelines, is mind-boggling.” The Louisa school superintendent had told a supervisor that FOIA doesn’t require school board to answer his questions. So there!
MARTINSVILLE When the Martinsville Bulletin asked how much city money had been spent on the local baseball field, Finance Director Wade Bartlett demanded a formal “FOIA request” before producing the answer. In a quick follow-up, the editorial page said, “The FOI request has been written and will be filed on Monday. The city then will have five days to respond. That means a week-long delay in getting a budget figure. City residents were led to believe a lot of money was spent on (Hooker Field). “If Mr. Bartlett is trying to duck, the fact that the city could lose the Astros and have no professional baseball here for the first time in 15 years, he is erring.” And, it added, citizens “need to know that city officials are responsive to the public and forthcoming with the public’s information. That is, after all, the role of a public servant.”
PAGE COUNTY A top official involved in a local landfill dispute was accused in the mid-’90s of hiding financial information while working for a New Jersey recycling company. The lawsuit was later settled for $634,000. A Daily News-Record reporter made the discovery simply by typing his name into an Internet search engine. County administrator Jerry M. Shiro said he was getting only cursory reports from the landfill operator. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality wants National Waste Services’ landfill permit revoked, arguing that it’s breaking the county’s permit by taking in upwards of 1,400 tons of garbage each day, much of it from out of state. DEQ said it should be taking in an average of 250 tons a day.
RICHMOND Sheriff Michelle Mitchell deals with reporters only when she must, like when they request public documents through Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act, or when they agree to questions in writing that she can respond to likewise. She thwarts face-to-face interviews. If her predecessor, retired Sheriff Andrew J. Winston, applied an “open door” approach to media inquiries, as he recalls, Mitchell’s style is close-mouthed. (—Style magazine)
RICHMOND City officials apparently don’t want to talk about the capital’s high murder rate. Claiming a “personnel” topic, city council, the city manager and several police officials went behind closed doors to talk about it. The Richmond Times-Dispatch called it an illegal meeting, and hauled everybody into court. Reporter Jeremy Redmon said he learned before the meeting that council members wanted a briefing from City Manager Calvin D. Jamison and the police department about a dramatic increase in the number of homicides. Jamison sought the closed meeting, saying he did not want to be embarrassed by an open grilling. The suit alleges that the FOIA provision cited for closing the meeting was a sham. It must be narrowly interpreted and permits secret discussion only of an official’s job performance. A circuit judge agreed to review transcripts and testimony from the 2-1/2-hour meeting to determine if an illegal discussion had occurred.
ROANOKE The school system failed to fully report numerous incidents of crime and violence between 1999 and 2002 but it took a FOIA request to obtain the information. Hundreds of pages of documents were obtained by The Roanoke Times (police and city hall produced them without cost; the school system charged $392.28). The documents revealed internal disputes between top city officials, alleged mishandling of serious incidents by school administrators, and disagreements over the roles of police officers in the schools. State and federal laws require schools to report all incidents that occur on school property involving assaults, sexual crimes, firearm possession, drug crimes, explosive or incendiary devices, bomb threats and threats to staff. Rob Jones, director of government relations for the Virginia Education Association, said some school systems serving low-income, high-crime areas have reported low numbers compared to the high numbers reported by low-crime suburban divisions, and “it has never passed the smell test.”
VIRGINIA BEACH Police and firefighter unions asked city council to sanction City Manager Spore for what they saw as repeated FOIA violations. Cited were his support for the region’s closed meeting to talk about roads, tolls and transportation taxes, his handling of an employee’s request to see part of an employee survey, and the city’s failure to disclose public records related to a dolphin tank at the Virginia Marine Science Museum. Spore called the allegations unfounded or misleading. “The city responds to hundreds of FOIA requests every year; we’ve only been found in violation one time (in the dolphin-tank case) and that was unintentional,” he said.
VIRGINIA BEACH Defense lawyer Allan Zaleski tangled first with Norfolk Circuit Judge Charles D. Griffith Jr., who took the lawyer off the local court-appointed list, then butted heads with the top-secret Judicial Inquiry & Review Commission. The lawyer was trying to obtain an advisory opinion “either formal or informal, either in writing or oral,” mentioned by Griffith during a sentencing dispute two years earlier. JIRC refused to release the opinion, saying its rulings “generally are not subject to public disclosure.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. Faced with a new record request from Virginia, the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority again claimed it is “not subject” to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act even though MWAA is a Virginia authority created by an act of the General Assembly. In the past, Del. Bob Marshall, R-Manassas, has complained that MWAA waives discretionary non-disclosure rules but only if it likes the requester’s “purpose” (Marshall was unable to obtain criteria MWAA used for awarding a contract to Mitsubishi). The authority is explicitly exempt from Virginia’s procurement act; no FOIA exemption exists.