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It took the Virginia Board and Regional Jails 17 days (that's 5 working days, plus a 7-day extension, both allowed by FOIA, plus two weekends and a holiday), to tell WRIC that it was withholding all 50 of the records the station's request turned up.
The Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority voted to approve two confidential settlements, so confidential that not only were the names and the amounts not disclosed, but neither was the name of the person the authority was settling with.
The Richmond Police Department said it would cost a requester at least $7,873 -- and the amount could end up higher -- just to get copies of the department's policies, commonly called "general orders." Despite the fact that many police departments post their general orders on their websites or provide them free of charge. The RPD said it would take 151 hours to read the policies for possible redactions. At that rate, said Richmond FOIA attorney Andrew Bodoh, it would take longer to review the policies than to read the entire Harry Potter series out loud.
After seeing texts he sent to fellow board members included in a story in The Washington Post, UVA Board of Visitors member Bert Ellis told his colleagues at the board's quarterly meeting that he had "learned my lesson about FOIA." The texts were critical of UVA student groups and administrators, calling the vice provost a "numnut," for example. Ellis said the messages were "private and confidential," but were still "out of place."
Attorney General Jason Miyares' office filed a subpoena to force Loudoun County Public Schools to release the report it commissioned in 2021 to examine its response to two high-profile sexual assaults in county schools. The school board has repeatedly voted against releasing the report, claiming it is protected in total by the exemption for attorney-client materials.
In February, NPR published a story about audio recordings documenting four executions carried out by the Department of Corrections between 1987 and 2017. The tapes -- there turned out to be 35 of them -- had been in the possession of the Library of Virginia, but after the NPR story aired, the DOC asked the library to hand the tapes over to them. Once in the possession of DOC, requests for them under FOIA have been denied.
A Pittsylvania County Circuit Court judge dismissed a FOIA lawsuit brought against the former chair of the county board of supervisors. The suit alleged that the chair and another board member -- who were two members of a three-member committee -- had a meeting without giving proper notice. The judge denied a subsequent motion to reconsider, which pointed out that while the chair testified in court that he hadn't met with his colleague, he also told reporters after the trial that he'd talked on the phone him.
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According to the Mayor of Blackstone, the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council has said that the mayor can meet with two members of the town council without triggering FOIA because according to the town charter, the mayor is not a member of the council. "We've got it on the record, and we got it from the FOIA people," he told council members.
A member of the Loudoun County School Board said she will be suing the county so that she can continue joining the board's meetings remotely. Saying that she has a permanent disability that prevents her from attending in-peron, Denise Corbo has not joined her colleagues since August 2021. Recently the board's chair has denied her requests to attend remotely, so Corbo said she had "no choice" but to sue for discrimination and harassment.
The Virginia State Police is investigating the video of a September 2020 meeting of the Pittsylvania County Planning Commission. A Gretna man said the minutes of the meeting did not match what happened during the meeting, and he then discovered that the portion of the meeting video where the commission talked about a special use permit for a solar farm was missing. After reviewing a video of the entire meeting in the Chatham Star-Tribune's possession, the county confirmed a portion was deleted inadvertently due to the manual "stitching" process of combining multiple 15-minute videos into one composite file.
Norfolk residents were asked to weigh in with their opinions of the finalists for chief of police. However, the residents were not given any identifying information, only their responses to a series of questions.
Attorneys for two of the defendants charged in the death of Irvo Otieno tried to stop the Dinwiddie Commonwealth's Attorney from releasing video from the Central State Hospital that showed how seven Henrico sheriff deputies and three hospital employees held Otieno down until he suffocated. The attorneys also sought to place a gag order on the CA. News outlets had already obtained access to the video since it was filed in the court case file, and a judge denied the gag order motion.
News that a member of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors was resigning was included a staff briefing that was live-streamed to the public. Another supervisor requested that the video be continued. News of the resignation needs to be public, he said, "We need to have transparency."
In one body cam video, an officer tells a colleague that he yelled to the man he just fatally shot to, "Let me see your hands." However, on the video released by Fairfax County, no such command can be heard.
The Portsmouth City Council adopted a rule in March to prohibit video recording from behind the dais, a move that one council member says targets him directly because he uses his phone to livestreams meetings to Facebook from his seat.
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