Among the reports included in the Dec. 4 agenda for Surry County’s Board of Supervisors was a list of Freedom of Information Act requests from the prior month. Board Chairman Robert Elliott says the list will become a regular addition to meeting agendas. “We’re going to make this available to the public so they can see the hours that our legal team is putting in with our FOIA requests,” Elliott said. “And since July until October, we had 39. I’m sure it’s more. This is the first time we’ve put this together, but we wanted to let the citizens know the FOIA requests that are coming out and sometimes you can look at this and if you have some questions you can see that it has already been asked and addressed by our legal team.” … “When you talk about transparency, transparency goes also to the motivation – to see clean through what somebody’s trying to accomplish – so when you talk about transparency, make sure your motives are right, make sure your motives are pure,” Elliott said. … “Government officials may question a requester’s motives, but those motives are irrelevant under the law. FOIA does not contain a test of purpose, reason, or purity. It protects the right of access, period,” said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.

Disagreements over a forensic audit and broader questions about city governance resurfaced publicly this month as Martinsville officials and outside attorneys offered conflicting accounts of the audit’s status and scope. City Council member Aaron Rawls held a news conference Dec. 9, saying he wanted to address what he described as public confusion surrounding several unresolved issues, including the audit and the handling of records related to the termination of former City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides. … On Monday, Benavides’ attorney, Paul Goldman, released another statement sharply criticizing Rawls and raising additional questions about the audit’s structure and oversight. In the statement, Goldman questioned why legal counsel, including the firm Sands Anderson, would be involved in reviewing the work of Brown & Edwards, the firm hired to conduct the forensic audit. Goldman also questioned whether the audit contract was competitively bid and who ultimately directs the auditors’ work.

A group of Martinsville residents is pushing forward with a recall petition aimed at Mayor LC Jones, citing concerns over transparency and financial management within city government. Patti Covington, Chief Administrator of the group leading the recall effort, says Mayor Jones and other city council members have not been honest with the public. “We’re really after restoring some transparency and trust in city government,” Covington said. Covington says many of the concerns stem from the firing of former Martinsville City Manager Aretha Ferrell-Benavides. “Concerns we have about Mayor Jones include that the mayor tried to stop the workplace investigation, he cast the sole dissenting vote to fire the city manager,” Covington said. Covington also said Jones approved a 15% raise for Ferrell-Benavides despite ongoing budget concerns. She said the final straw for her and many residents was city council’s decision not to release the findings of the taxpayer-funded investigation that followed Ferrell-Benavides’ firing.

Prince William County schools mistakenly shared student and parent personal information with Hazel Health, a third-party partner of the school division. The division on Dec. 19 sent a notification to the affected families notifying them that on Dec. 16 Hazel Health inadvertently sent a welcome text to families who had not opted into the provider’s service. Hazel Health is the division’s contracted provider of mental telehealth services to students at no cost to families. Following the mistaken welcome text, the school system discovered it had “unintentionally disclosed” personal identifiable information for those who had not opted into the service, the division said in its statement to the affected families.

Albemarle County has released new details of the June cyberattack that took down the internet in county offices and exposed roughly 185 gigabytes of county personnel and resident data. Initially tight-lipped about what it first called a “cybersecurity incident,” the county revealed in July that it had been the target of a ransomware attack overnight between June 10 and June 11. News of the attack was only announced after Albemarle government office buildings lost internet on June 12, the same day that multiple internet providers in Central Virginia reported outages and search engine giant Google’s cloud crashed. Whether any of the outages and the cyberattack were linked has never been made clear. .. Although the county did not divulge it had been the target of a ransomware attack at the time, new information released this month shows that county officials and cybersecurity experts were able to identify it as such soon after the attack occurred. “On the morning of June 11, 2025, Albemarle County discovered issues with our IT systems and quickly determined that we were the victim of a ransomware incident,” the county said in a report released Dec. 17.

Blacksburg Town Council Member Liam Watson resigned Wednesday, eight days after a jury convicted him of two felony counts of election fraud and one felony count of illegal voting. Watson, whose term was set to expire in 2027, wrote in his resignation letter that he is “heartbroken” by the jury’s verdict but “respects their decision.” … Watson’s three felony convictions, which carry a potential sentence of up to 25 years, stem from false addresses he listed on candidate and voter registration forms ahead of his successful 2023 campaign. At the time, Watson was living in Richmond and at his parent’s Montgomery County home but used the address of a Blacksburg rental property owned through a company by Hager-Smith.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has been left mortified after the public has realized they can easily un-redact top secret Epstein files. This comes after the long-awaited release of the files came heavily redacted. However, many have since discovered that this can be undone as cybersecurity expert, Chad Loder, shared how he was able to lift the redactions from portions of the documents.