At the risk of repeating myself from month to month, February proved to be a busy one for FOIA in the courts: two opinions (one unpublished) from the Court of Appeals, three decisions at the circuit court level, and one at the federal level. The biggest one for VCOG was the one saying police departments can’t redact the names of their police officers from a salary database on the hypothetical argument that they may one day do undercover work.

There’s plenty of open government news, even in a short month, including yet another step in the journey of the UVA report on the murder of three football players.

VCOG wrapped up its annual legislative session efforts, with a few wins but also too many lost opportunities, and our intern penned a column about her observations of the process. 

VCOG continued preparations for our annual conference and announced its annual open government award winners. Make sure to register: just one month left!

FOIA in the Courts

A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for Virginia overturned a Hanover Circuit Court judge’s ruling that allowed the Hanover Sheriff’s Office to redact the names of 220 officers from a spreadsheet of salary data. The sheriff claimed that the exemption in §2.2-3706(B)(8) applied because any one of those officers might be used in undercover operations in the future.

The exemption allows withholding “[t]hose portions of any records containing information related to undercover operations or protective details that would reveal the staffing, logistics, or tactical plans of such undercover operations or protective details.” The Court of Appeals, however, pointed to language in §2.2-3705.1(1) that says the “records of the name, position, job classification, official salary, or rate of pay” must be disclosed. The word “name” was inserted in 2017, the court added, which was after §2.2-3706(B)(8) was enacted, “further supports our conclusion that names of law enforcement personnel are not exempted from production.”

The court also noted that the exemption only applies if the records are “related to” undercover operations and that the disclosure of the records “would reveal” the staffing, logistics or tactical plans of those operations. In this exemption, the court ruled, “would” is a contingency, meaning that “if the information is provided, then undercover operations are revealed.” The sheriff offered no evidence that the officers were engaged in any current undercover operations. Instead, the sheriff was engaged in hypotheticals. “The possibility of the future assignment of 220 officers to undercover duty is merely speculative,” the court wrote.

Judge Lisa Lorish wrote a brief concurrence saying the sheriff was also wrong to rely on §2.2-3706(B)(10), which specifically mentions the identity of undercover officers, because there was no evidence that any officer whose name was redacted “had worked undercover, was currently working undercover, or was slated to work undercover on a specific operation.”

The Prince William Commonwealth’s Attorney was ordered to pay $22,250 in attorney fees to the counsel for a Fairfax citizen over multiple FOIA violations. The citizen first requested records related to a closed criminal investigative case in January 2022, when the law briefly required police and prosecutors to open the file to determine what records had to be released and which ones could or had to be withheld (the law reverted to total discretion in July 2022). The CA said there were no records. The citizen later asked for related records in May 2022 and was given seven. A third FOIA request in September 2022 yielded the same seven records, but a fourth request in October 2022 yielded 172 messages. The judge said the responses to the first three requests violated FOIA because the CA didn’t turn over the 172 messages it had all along. The judge also said the messages that were finally released were heavily redacted but without a match between the redaction and the exemption cited to justify it.

During the 2025 legislative session, Megan Rhyne spent most of her time on bills that had the most impact on the public’s right to know. Either they directly amended an important part of FOIA, or they were written into other sections of the code. She lobbied for several bills, lobbied against others, and many she just hoped to get amended to a narrower focus before they went any further. But despite the early promise of several pro-public FOIA initiatives, several bills were watered down or defeated towards the end of the session.

VCOG’s 2025 Chip Woodrum Legislative Intern has been Peggy Stansbery, a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University. Peggy shared her thoughts on how the General Assembly’s arcane language and processes make its work inaccessible to the public. The paid internship is made possible by a generous donation from the family of the late Delegate Chip Woodrum of Roanoke, a tireless champion of FOIA and of education, and is open each year to college seniors and recent graduates.

Read Peggy’s observations here.

Citizens for Fauquier County
Samuel B. Parker, Richmond Times-Dispatch
Sen. Danica Roem

All three will be honored at VCOG’s annual conference, April 3, in Harrisonburg

In its motion to go into a closed session, the Mathews Board of Supervisors said it was going to talk about personnel matters. After the closed session, the board moved to accept the resignation of the IT department head. Individual personnel actions can be discussed in closed session. However, the supervisors also voted to dissolve the IT department altogether, something that is not within the purview of the personnel exemption and something that was not on the agenda when the meeting started.

When changing the rules governing its public comment period to allow for three minutes of comment at the start of the meeting, rather than before each vote, Norfolk’s mayor said the change was needed because “[A]pplicants and their architects, attorneys and engineers often face long wait times to speak on their agenda items.”

The Rockingham County Circuit Courthouse got its yearly batch of logbooks back from Kofile, a company in North Carolina that cleans paper records. Each year, the circuit court applies for conservation grants to preserve historical records from the 1800s. Chaz Haywood, clerk of the circuit court, will discuss this process and the various historical treasures buried at the courthouse at VCOG’s annual conference, April 3, in Harrisonburg.

After the Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney said he was withdrawing his concerns about the impact a report about the events leading up to and following the shooting deaths of three UVA football players on the trial for the accused shooter, UVA announced it would release the $1.5 million report in mid-March. In the meantime, the school released a copy to the family of the victims. The mother of one of the victims told The Daily Progress, though, “There’s nothing in there. They’ve taken everything out.” She said UVA redacted a majority of the report. Later, when pressed by The Daily Progress, UVA insisted that the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act — which protects students’ “educational records” necessitated the redactions, a conclusion disputed by VCOG’s Megan Rhyne.
 

The Blacksburg Town Council voted to censure one of its members for having “eroded trust” by, in part, making “disparaging remarks” about fellow council members after their votes on a measure to recover costs for emergency medical services.

The Town of Warrenton opened up its Next Request FOIA-processing platform to allow anyone to access 2,663 of the more than 3,000 email messages the town fought in court to withhold. After reviewing the messages, some in the town wondered why so much effort was put into the lawsuit because they did not reveal anything particularly novel.

Three members of the Purcellville Town Council refused to certify a closed meeting that was supposed to be about personnel matters. The council members told Loudoun Now they were concerned the session did not meet legal or personnel requirements. The town is undergoing some turmoil as the vice mayor, who is also an active duty police officer, is subject to an interval affairs investigation being conducted by the Prince William Police Department.

Emails obtained by The Advance showed two members of the Spotsylvania School Board are not taking part in two-by-two meetings arranged by the superintendent. Two-by-two meetings are a way to discuss the public body’s business without triggering FOIA’s meeting rules, which kick in when three or more members meet to discuss public business.

An audit of Richmond Public Schools found an email tip line for reporting fraud and abuse had 700 unopened emails in it dating back to 2014.

In response to a FOIA request for documents of possible severance offers made to the former director of the Department of Public Utilities, the City of Richmond said there was one document but that it wasn’t going to release it. Later, the city said the director wasn’t receiving severance but the document wasn’t being released.

The City of Fredericksburg took the position that the resumes of potential candidates to fill a vacancy on the city council did not have to be disclosed, even though a VCOG-inspired bill from 2024 says specifically that. The city instead said the resumes were subject to FOIA, and were thus exempt as personnel records.

Join us April 3 at Court Square Theater in Harrisonburg for our annual conference. Our keynote speaker is Chaz Nuttycombe of State Navigate, and we will have panels and speakers on university records on animal testing, buried historical treasures at the courthouse, practical uses of AI and the transparency (or lack thereof) of solar and data center projects.

Thank you to our sponsors and donors, including:

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