At $365,000, Chief Administrative Officer Odie Donald II’s salary topped the list of City Hall’s nearly 4,000 employees for the fiscal year, according to payroll records obtained by The Times-Dispatch. The CAO’s 2025 compensation is over $30,000 greater than the next highest-paid employee, City Attorney Laura Drewry, who will bring home $333,522.78. It is also more than double Mayor Danny Avula’s $180,000 salary, and nearly five times the city’s median salary of $74,103.99. Richmond’s median household income, meanwhile, is just over $63,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The payroll records, obtained through a public records request, show the city’s personnel totals have shrunk slightly, decreasing from 4,279 workers in 2024 to 3,978 this year. Despite that, total employee wages increased from $307 million to $332 million.

An ever-increasing amount of Falls Church history is now available with just a few keystrokes. The city’s Mary Riley Styles Public Library has started encouraging the public to take a test drive of its new digital archive. Though the library held a soft launch for the archive a year ago, “we wanted to build the collection” before formally unveiling it, said Marshall Webster, the adult-services supervisor for the library. Webster was speaking during a Dec. 13 tutorial that drew local residents interested in getting the most out of the new system.

A class action lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court alleges that the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority in September was the subject of a hack that exposed Social Security numbers and other sensitive information belonging to the authority’s clients. … In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Ohio resident Nathan Custalow-Hall alleges he was a former patient of the RBHA who on Dec. 4 received a data breach notice letter from the authority. In the letter, officials notified him that they had “detected unusual activity on some of (the RBHA’s) computers” and had subsequently conducted an investigation, according to the suit. That investigation indicated that the authority had been the victim of a data breach on Sept. 29 — more than two months before Custalow-Hall received the letter.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a confidential draft agreement to more than a dozen states that would require election officials to remove any alleged ineligible voters identified during a federal review of their voter rolls. The agreement — called a memorandum of understanding, or MOU — would hand the federal government a major role in election administration, a responsibility that belongs to the states under the U.S. Constitution. … The draft memorandum of understanding, which is labeled “confidential,” outlines the terms of the proposed agreement between each state and the Justice Department.

According to the state’s Office of Fiscal Analysis, Connecticut’s tax credit program for film and television production costs the state’s bottom line. But while the public has an interest in understanding exactly how that loss occurs, an exemption for trade secrets in the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) makes that impossible. In November 2024, Inside Investigator submitted a FOIA request to the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) seeking eligibility documents, tax credit certificates, or any other documentation ITV America submitted to the agency as part of an application for the Digital Media and Motion Picture Tax Credit (production credit) for its production of Hell’s Kitchen, which recently shifted to filming in Connecticut. … In the 36-page series operating budget for series 23 and 24 of Hell’s Kitchen that ITV America submitted as part of its film production credit application, all but two pages are blacked out entirely.

Nearly all officers in Illinois must wear body cameras to help collect evidence and keep officers accountable. However, several legislative efforts this year tried to limit access to that footage, according to an analysis by BGA Policy. Body camera footage is already treated differently under the Freedom of Information Act. Other government records are presumed available under FOIA, unless exempted. However, body camera video is presumed exempt, unless it meets specific criteria. Research from BGA Policy found six bills that would have made accessing that footage even harder.

School districts and other state and local governments openly flout South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act because they know they can get away with it. They use our tax dollars to drag out most lawsuits long enough to run up the bill so the plaintiffs give up, if they even bother suing. And even when the legal fight continues, there’s practically no penalty when governments finally lose — as they inevitably do. Maybe the government will have to pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees — although they tend to fight that — but what do officials care? It’s not their money. There’s certainly no penalty for elected officials who deliberately violated the law. And there’s not even a real penalty for the school district or city or county or state agency. … Significant monetary penalties would help, because insurance companies could force governments to settle, but ultimately, we probably need action against elected officials who vote to do public business in private. But as a start, we’d be happy with changes that shift the burden of policing FOI violations away from individuals and private entities and to some entity that could bring lawsuits or criminal charges against violators.