Council committees propose fixes, will further study other issues
At the council’s Aug. 5 meeting, Sen. Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania, and Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, switched roles. The council’s enabling legislation requires the chairmanship to rotate every four years. Houck will now be the council’s vice chair, while Griffith will pick up the gavel as chair from now on.
Also at its Aug. 5, the council set up two more work groups. Section 2.203704(J) of FOIA requires state government agencies to publicly disclose an index of the databases they maintain.The law says the index has to include things like a list of data fields, a description of the format or record layout, a list of any data fields not publicly available and a fee schedule for accessing them.
Noting that VITA and the Library of Virginia work with agencies to maintain and secure their databases, and that audit standards may no longer mesh with FOIA’s requirements, the council set up a workgroup to study whether the requirement was still needed, or whether the requirements needed to be adjusted to reflect current technological standards
New council member Frosty Landon chaired the group, joined by Bill Axselle, Mary Yancey Spencer and Mary Clark, a Library of Virginia representative.
The full council agreed to advance a bill that would delete the original language and add a provision to the rights and responsibilities section requiring state agencies to generally summarize the types of records it holds, as well as exemptions they typically rely on and other FOIA policies they might have, and post that information on their Web sites.
Another work group convened to study whether recordings of meetings satisfied the minutes requirement of FOIA. The issue has come to light as more and more local governments use services like BoardDocs to commemorate meetings by making recordings and supplement documents available online. Some citizens have complained that the recorded minutes cannot by easily navigated to find specific references. Houck expressed concern that electronic-only minutes may lead to a digital divide between those who were technologically savvy and those who weren’t.
The council endorsed the subcommittee’s recommendation to require minutes, which must include a “summary,” to be in writing.
PII: one more year
The Personal Identifying Information subcommittee met several times, eventually agreeing to focus on Del. Mark Sickles’ (D-Franconia) bills regarding access to Social Security Numbers generally, tabling the two bills that were specific to certain agencies.
After generally agreeing to take the do-not-release-SSNs provision our of FOIA and adding it to a newly created chapter within Title 2.2, the committee came up with three options (in all options, release would be allowed when required by state or federal law): (1) withhold the entire SSN at all times; (2) allow government to verbally confirm the last three or four digits to those requesting it; or (3) allow government, in its discretion, to disclose the last three or four digits upon request.
Rather than reach any consensus, the council sent the issue back to the subcommittee for further study in the coming year.
The PII subcommittee also recommended to resubmit Houck’s bill limiting access to concealed weapons permits, but which would not apply to records at the courthouse. A Second Amendment-rights group said it will oppose the bill because of the courthouse-access issue. The gun-rights group has also expressed support for a carve-out for access by gun-education groups. The FOIA Council endorsed the subcommittee’s recommendation.
The e-meetings subcommittee studied an exception to new rules for the air- and water-permitting boards of the Department of Environmental Quality.
More than two dozen stakeholders during the 2008 legislative session worked feverishly to rewrite the permitting process. At cross-over, with little to no notice, a provision was inserted that would allow the various boards to meet electronically to review the decision of the board chair to grant (or not) a public hearing for a permit. Among other things, the new provision allowed board members could meet at locations not open to the public.
The council endorsed the subcommittee’s recommendation to insert language to open up the remote meeting locations. During the subcommitte meetings, the stakeholders consistently opposed any change, not because of the merits, but because of the “blood oath” they all took upon the bill’s passage not to reopen it for any reason. Council member Ralph “Bill” Axselle, also a stakeholder in the permitting rewrite, encouraged the council’s endorsement, saying he thought the change was consistent with the bill’s overall intent. Other supporters said it wasn’t good public policy to refuse to fix flawed legislation solely on the grounds that many people had worked out a compromise.