With most of the Richmond City Council and several top aides to Mayor Danny Avula gathered in the same room Wednesday afternoon, several officials agreed it was important to have a conversation about transparency at City Hall. Just not now. Two competing proposals were on a Council committee’s agenda dealing with the city’s failure to follow a 2015 law requiring detailed spending data to be published online. The committee put off both proposals until June after Councilor Ellen Robertson (6th District) — who chairs the Council’s Finance and Economic Development Committee — shut down efforts by Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) to discuss the issue more fully. … Robertson said she was cutting off Gibson’s questions because she wanted to allow more time for the Council to have all its questions answered before the proposals come back in June. “And we’re not going to entertain that today in this committee,” Robertson said. … The stated purpose for the delay was to allow more time for discussion and questions, even as in-the-moment discussion was being halted.

Members of the community and the Warren County Board of Supervisors reacted Tuesday night during the supervisors’ regularly scheduled meeting to last week’s raucous Planning Commission meeting. … That meeting devolved into discontent after commissioners limited the public comment time. County administrators clarified this week that the board has the authority to adjust that time period. Many in attendance appeared to believe the comment period was a public hearing, which cannot legally be limited. Audience members and Planning Commission Chairman Robert Myers verbally spared over applause. County policy prohibits applause during public comment periods. When audience members clapped, Myers referred to them as “children” and their behavior as immature. After tabling the items, commissioners discussed scheduling a work session on the data center requests. Fork District Commissioner Paul Barnhart Jr. referred to the crowd as a “lynch mob” who “ain’t gonna shut up.” At Tuesday night’s supervisors’ meeting, two speakers took offense to that series of events. … Madison Sanders criticized supervisors for not admonishing commissioners for their behavior in the meeting, adding that residents took time to come out and make their thoughts known only to be met by a board that seemed “so inconvenienced to be here to listen.”

The city of Martinsville has acknowledged that personal information may have been accessed during a March cyberattack, marking a shift from earlier public statements that said no consumer or citizen information had been compromised. In a public notice posted on the city’s website, city officials said Martinsville was the victim of a cybersecurity incident discovered “on or about March 25, 2026,” when the city’s technology team became aware of disruptions affecting municipal computer systems. … “Due to the nature of this incident, it is possible that personal information may have been accessed by the perpetrators of the incident,” the notice stated.

Peggy Harkness, New Market’s vice mayor and a Town Council member for more than a decade, has resigned from the council. Harkness said in a brief phone interview that she stepped down after a disagreement with Town Manager Nathan Garrison. “I had a disagreement with Nathan,” Harkness said. “And that’s all I’ll say.”

South Carolina Circuit Judge Daniel Coble early Wednesday afternoon nixed a bid by activist groups to void a historic Congressional redistricting bill passed this week by the state House Republican majority, saying the state’s open meetings law didn’t apply in this case. In his one-page ruling, which came just hours after oral arguments before him at the Richland County courthouse Wednesday morning Coble ruled that the issue before him was “a purely political question” over which he had no authority, and any “judicial intervention would violate well-established separation of powers principles.” In any event, Coble’s ruling said, state Freedom of Information Act provisions which plaintiffs in the case had accused S.C. House members of violating did not apply in the present case.