Two new bills of interest:
HB 213 (Mullin): Requires that formal advisory opinions issued by the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council (Council) be approved by the Council and, after such approval, be published on the Council’s website. The bill also provides that no officer, employee, or member of a public body shall be found to have willfully and knowingly violated certain enumerated provisions of the Freedom of Information Act if the alleged violation resulted from his good faith reliance on a formal advisory opinion of the Council made in response to his written request for such opinion and such opinion was made after a full disclosure of the facts.
HB 228 (Cole): Provides that notwithstanding any provision of law requiring a public record to be retained in a tangible medium, an agency may retain any public record in an electronic medium, provided that the record remains accessible for the duration of its retention schedule and meets all other requirements of the Virginia Public Records Act (§ 42.1-76 et seq.).
Hanover County has put much of its checkbook online in an effort to make information about local spending more accessible. Hanover’s monthly payments for things like electricity, construction services and office supplies can now be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet from the county’s website. New reports are planned to go online each month to shed more light on the county’s expenses. Not included in the reports is information deemed confidential, private or protected, such as tax refunds, payments to jurors and payroll information, according to the county. Getting the vendor payments online was one of the Board of Supervisors’ initiatives for fiscal 2018.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Though Mike Signer says he will follow the tradition of serving just a single term as mayor, the City Council will not select Charlottesville’s next mayor in the usual way at its first meeting of the year Tuesday. In a series of interviews Friday, after Nikuyah Walker and Heather Hill were sworn into office as councilors, several council members said they are planning to hold a public discussion about who should be the next mayor before making their decision. “We’re not coming in with a decision already made,” Hill said.
The Daily Progress
A 25-student class at Roanoke College spent the fall semester digitally preserving more than 200 newspaper clippings collected by the northwest Roanoke church between the 1950s and the 1970s. Those articles — representing work from The Roanoke Times, The Roanoke Tribune and The Roanoke Star — are now available to the public through an online database (http://bit.ly/2CbB17X). The class also created a timeline (http://bit.ly/2zCBgUo) that highlights some of the major issues experienced by the black community during segregation, such as the dump operated in Washington Park, which posed numerous health risks to the historically black neighborhood. The project also documents landmark efforts to desegregate Roanoke, like the Woolworth lunch counter integration and the integration of city schools.
The Roanoke Times
