The response to The Messenger’s Freedom of Information (FOIA) request from Charlotte County’s School Board members was revealing. The School Board office promptly provided all requested information from the members’ official e-mails. All members either responded or stated in their response that they did not use their personal e-mails for school business. However, some of the responses came from personal e-mail accounts documenting the statements were not accurate. A larger concern was revealed in the Board members’ official e-mails. Board Members Jay George and JonPaul Berkeley have not opened a single email in over six months on their official email accounts. This means that any attempt to contact George or Berkeley via email was ignored. The messenger’s FOIA request was unread as well as dozens of communications from the board office and others. A related concern is Board Member Teresa Dunaway’s invitation-only Facebook account “for our Children.” Southside Messenger
Prince William County School Board Chairman Ryan Sawyers didn’t attend the board’s first meeting after he called for Superintendent Steve Walts’ resignation, yet Sawyers was very much the focus of the gathering anyway. The board seemed set for a showdown at its Feb. 21 meeting over part of Sawyers’ dispute with the superintendent, which stems from Walts’ handling of the aftermath of a car wreck he was involved in last August. But when Sawyers realized he couldn’t attend, he decided to delay the consideration of an agenda item that could have prompted an open debate on the chairman’s calls for Walts to step down. Nevertheless, the friction between Sawyers and Walts cast a pall over the proceedings, with some board members even leading an unsuccessful push to strip the chairman of some of his power to set board meeting agendas. The five-hour-long gathering often turned heated, with even some of Sawyers’ political allies taking shots at his leadership. InsideNoVa
Jack Black was a local celebrity last year — but not the actor. According to data acquired from the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority through the Freedom of Information Act, Jack Daniel’s No. 7 Black brought in the most sales dollars for stores in several local counties — Washington, Smyth, Wythe and Scott — in the 2017 fiscal year. Jack Daniel’s No. 7 Black was also the only brand that made every local, wet county’s top-five list. [Grayson, Bland, Russell and Lee counties are dry.] ABC stores in Southwest Virginia sold more than 24,000 bottles of the booze. Bristol Herald Courier
national stories of interest
The board of the District’s only public hospital plans to sue the city’s Office of Open Government rather than release a recording of a secret meeting at which members voted to close the hospital’s nursery and delivery rooms, board Chair LaRuby May said. The legal challenge, which May disclosed at a hearing before the D.C. Council’s Health Committee Wednesday night, is unprecedented in the modern era of D.C. government transparency. Although the District’s Open Meetings Act allows the Office of Open Government — which judges whether agencies are complying with sunshine regulations — to sue public boards that do not follow the law, there is no explicit provision for agencies to take legal action against the office, and it has never been done before. Washington Post
The State Department was sued Wednesday for withholding documents detailing the process that preceded its publication of an article touting President Trump’s privately-owned Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Benjamin Wittes, a co-founder of the Lawfare Blog legal website and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, filed the suit in D.C. federal court after the State Department failed to respond in time to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the publication of the article, “Mar-a-Lago: The winter White House,” and its use by multiple agency websites and social media accounts last spring, according to his six-page complaint. Washington Times
EFF and MuckRock have a launched a new public records campaign to reveal how much data law enforcement agencies have collected using automated license plate readers and are sharing with each other. Over the next few weeks, the two organizations are filing approximately 1,000 public records requests with agencies that have deals with Vigilant Solutions, one of the nation’s largest vendors of ALPR surveillance technology and software services. We’re seeking documentation showing who’s sharing ALPR data with whom. We are also requesting information on how many plates each agency scanned in 2016 and 2017 and how many of those plates were on predetermined “hot lists” of vehicles suspected of being connected to crimes. You can see the full list of agencies and track the progress of each request through the Street-Level Surveillance: ALPR Campaign page on MuckRock. MuckRock
Follow the bills we follow on VCOG