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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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