Three members of Purcellville’s Town Council have filed an emergency motion looking to halt any votes by the body on tax rates until the court rules on how many council members need to support the tax rate. In October, council members Erin Rayner, Caleb Stought and Kevin Wright filed a court petition requesting a judicial review of a vote to set last fiscal year’s tax rates. The vote passed 4-3, with Rayner, Stought and Wright opposing. Loudoun’s towns have long held that votes on tax rates must pass with at least a two-thirds majority, but then-Town Attorney John Cafferky advised that was only the case when imposing new taxes, not setting existing ones.

Open government organizations in Tennessee and Virginia agree that increased ICE enforcement efforts have come with increasing secrecy by federal and some state and local law enforcement agencies. The Tennessee Highway Patrol — subject to a 287(g) task force agreement with ICE — has participated in immigration efforts and arrests with ICE officers. Deborah Fisher, executive director for the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, said she has heard of various public and media concerns about THP withholding information such as its high-speed pursuit policy. … The Legal Aid Justice Center recently filed Virginia Freedom of Information Act requests for law enforcement agencies’ 287(g) agreements. “Not as many as should have responded under FOIA,” said Megan Rhyne, Virginia Coalition for Open Government director, “but they were able to determine that 34 or more localities had these agreements.” “I’ve heard of a locality where the attorney said, ‘we can’t respond to this FOIA request because our agreement with ICE says we can’t reveal certain information,’” Rhyne said, “which is not a legitimate response.”

The University of South Carolina Upstate Police Department has twice declined to provide a copy of the incident report detailing the allegations that led to the arrest of Spartanburg County Councilmember Monier Abusaft on March 5. The refusal to provide the document to a reporter who showed up in person violates the state’s Freedom of Information Act, according to S.C. Press Association attorney Jay Bender, who helped craft the public records law. “They’re either ignorant of the law or they’re willfully violating it,” Bender said.

While you can be charged a per-page copying fee, capped at 25 cents per page, for paper records, there are usually no fees associated with copying electronic records (though there are exceptions to that rule if retrieving them requires specialized software or expertise). … Currently, Connecticut’s courts and the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) have interpreted the state’s FOIA law in a way that prevents agencies from charging requesters those types of fees. But that may soon change. … There’s been a recent spate of FOIC cases involving public agencies providing invoices to requesters and asking them to pay before the requests are processed. In one case, the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) quoted a requester over $40,000 to fulfill a request. The fee included both a per-page copying fee for electronic records and an hourly fee for the amount of time employees spend searching for records. In every single case they have ruled on, the FOIC has rejected agency fee schemes. But those rulings have since been appealed. Should those appeals succeed, advocates and other requestors fear fundamental changes to their ability to use the law. Exorbitant fees could be weaponized against requesters who agency employees don’t like, be used to prevent the release of sensitive information, or limit the amount of information requesters can afford to obtain.