A proposed deal to put solar panels on dozens of Richmond’s city-owned rooftops might be dead. Or it might be brought back to life in a few days. At the end of a chaotic City Council meeting Monday night, no one seemed sure what had just happened. … Council members who voted against the deal said they weren’t against solar energy, but were trying to do enough due diligence to get comfortable supporting a complex deal that involved 39 leases for city-owned rooftops. … Near the end of a meeting that stretched almost to 11 p.m., several Council members asked to go into a closed session to consult with City Attorney Laura Drewry, who they said had expressed her own reservations about the solar deal. Council leadership, which favored the proposal, instead moved forward with a vote to approve. That vote failed 4-5, prompting a confused scramble to figure out what to do. Council members on both sides seemed surprised by the apparent finality of the outcome. Staffers rushed to consult Council rules to see what procedural options might be available to continue the discussion. When a closed session was suggested again, the Council concluded that wasn’t possible because the deal had been voted down and there was nothing to discuss.

A draft lease between the Rappahannock County Public Library and its potential landlord was released Tuesday by the library’s board of trustees’ negotiating committee. The documents can be found at the library or on its website. “A library is one of the few community spaces that belongs to everyone,” said Victoria Fortuna, president of the Library Board of Trustees, in an email to the Rappahannock News Tuesday with the documents enclosed. … Michael Chamowitz, a negotiating committee member, added that the committee was bound by a “confidentiality clause” in the letter of intent it signed with Black Kettle, the potential landlord, in March. “It’s unfortunate that we haven’t been able to be a little bit more public about this process, and I concur that there are real concerns that people have, and I hope these documents will help resolve some of those concerns,” said John Beardsley, another committee member and vice president of the board.

A Pennsylvania state board created to review billions of dollars in tax credits and government spending quietly stopped meeting three years ago and board members won’t say why. The state’s widely touted first-of-its-kind Performance-Based Budget Board was formed by law in 2017 with bipartisan support and a simple purpose: to evaluate in public hearings how state departments and tax credits performed and fund them based on whether they met certain goals instead of just automatically updating previous years’ budget numbers, which is what Harrisburg lawmakers were doing at the time. … But after a political spat over how the Department of Education’s spending was reviewed, where Democrats changed key facts in the analysis, the board ended its short run in 2023, before the first five-year cycle was completed, without notifying other lawmakers or the public.