The fight largely got resolved in the ’04 session when Sen. Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania, and House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, struck a compromise that kept legislative sessions under FOIA, yet exempted legislative caucuses even when they deal with public business.
Left unaddressed, however, was what to do about legislators’ hallway huddles, office get-togethers and social occasions where the talk is not just about hurricanes, the ACC or the stock market.
An interim subcommittee of the Joint Rules Committee chaired by Griffith had been asked to recommend non-FOIA rules to deal with those grey-area meetings.
Originally, Griffith wanted Joint Rules to write explicit rules to close the informal, unannounced meetings. But after three hours of informal discussion with media and open-government representatives at a meeting in June, Griffith said word-smithing by Joint Rules might cause “more problems than it solves.” (The legislature’s numerous single-issue and special-interest “caucuses” proved to be particularly irksome for would-be rules-writers.)
Unable to reach agreement the subcommittee decided, as one member put it, to “let a sleeping dog lie.” Weeks later, it was reported that members of Joint Rules had agreed with the subcommittee.
Other subcommittee members included Del. Leo Wardrup, R-Virginia Beach, and Sen. Fred Quayle, R-Chesapeake. In the ’04 session, Wardrup had been one of the most outspoken foes of keeping the General Assembly’s meetings under FOIA; seeing the Houck compromise, however, he was one of the first Rules Subcommittee members to urge an end to the fight.
Legislators and open-government supporters agreed that the current FOIA law relating to requirements for closed and open legislative meetings was preferable to allowing Joint Rules to write new secrecy rules every session.
The FOI statute already includes language permitting legislators to waive requirements for public-meeting notice when meeting informally; thus, all that’s unaddressed is whether an informal, unannounced meeting can be closed if a non-legislator tries to crash it.