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All Access
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Richmond City Council members have scheduled to approve FY 2027’s budget at a formal meeting Monday night, coinciding with introduced legislation to investigate why the city has not published monthly, line-by-line lists of how officials spent taxpayer money for years. That information is outlined in the payment register, which the city — by code — is supposed to have easily accessible online each month, but has reportedly not done so since 2019. Richmond Councilwoman Kenya Gibson introduced this investigation resolution, and said it would have helped prepare for budget season for the upcoming budget and give residents transparency over city spending. “We host district meetings, transparency comes up again and again,” Gibson explained to 8News, after formally asking for past payment registries in February. “People are spending more and more to be able to live here in Richmond, and I think it’s reasonable for them to be able to expect to have an understanding about where the money is going.”
WRIC
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Local
Surry County’s School Board has announced plans to meet in closed session on May 12 to discuss “personnel and budget” matters. However, Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, says there’s no exception in Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act allowing budget talks to be done behind closed doors. … “The budget will not need to be adjusted per se, but we will need to look at personnel in reference to job descriptions, caseloads, master schedule, internal movement of staff both instructional and operational to see where we can save cost through sharing teachers, attrition and other creative staffing shifts,” Superintendent Herbert Monroe said. … “In my opinion, they should have that conversation in public,” Rhyne said. “Though individuals will be affected, they are talking about structural, operational changes, and that’s a public issue.”
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Local
Opponents of a Google data center in Botetourt County have been frustrated by a lack of information, including how it will draw power. The tech giant has not released much specific information about a potential data center it plans to build near Daleville since it purchased more than 300 acres in the Greenfield industrial park last year. Many of the details are shielded by non-disclosure agreements with local government agencies and other partners. But Google formally announced its intentions around the data center with a press release last month, and company officials are beginning to discuss the project.
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Higher Ed
University of Virginia faculty and staff told Charlottesville Tomorrow that a growing wave of outside scrutiny, from online harassment to sweeping demands for their course materials, has left them feeling exposed and increasingly unsafe, with little protection or responsiveness from the university. … Between January 1, 2025 and December 17, 2025, of the 978 requests UVA’s FOIA office received, 19 were seeking more than 200 syllabi, according to information Charlottesville Tomorrow obtained through its own records request. … 16 of the requests for syllabi came from Stu Smith, a conservative social media poster and self-described “citizen journalist.” The Jefferson Council posted on its website that in May 2024, Smith was part of a virtual conversation series “to discuss the condition of free speech on university campuses across the US, why it’s important to capture and distribute multiple sides of each story, and what this looks like in practice at UVA specifically.” In a personal blog post on Dec. 26, 2025, The Jefferson Council co-founder James Bacon called Smith a “comrade in arms.”
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Editorial
At this point, Norfolk City Council’s best hope of recovering squandered public funds at the city’s housing authority might be to charge a fee to other localities around the country for training sessions on how not to operate a public agency. Unfortunately, the lessons might be too obvious to generate much interest. If there were any takers, though, the first lessons might focus on a WHRO investigation revealing that the now-fired director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority issued no-bid contracts worth more than $1 million to former colleagues and business associates — undetected for two years by the NRHA board of commissioners.
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