All Access

On Monday, I listed what I felt were the top 10 things the legislature did (or didn’t do) this year. Today, here’s a list of the 25 most overlooked bills, with emphasis on ones from legislators from Southwest and Southside. Most of these, while important, were also so non-controversial that they passed either unanimously or by wide, bipartisan margins. .... 23. Million-dollar lottery winners would no longer be identified: If you’re lucky enough to win $1 million or more in the Virginia Lottery, there might be signs — the new Lamborghini in the driveway, for instance, or your endless supply of eggs — but there won’t be a story in the news media. HB 1799 by Del. Scott Wyatt, R-Hanover County, would ban the lottery from disclosing the names of those who win $1 million or more. This is intended to protect the privacy and perhaps safety of those who win big time. The current threshold for non-disclosure is $10 million; this bill would lower that. Of course, if you win that much and want to tell the world, that’s up to you, but the state won’t be doing it.

The West Virginia Senate Military Committee, on Friday, considered a bill designed to exempt certain currently-public military records from access by the public. Under SB 103 – introduced by Committee Chair Ryan Weld, R-Brooke – “information properly classified to protect national or state security,” certain vulnerability assessments, response plans, communication codes, and military deployment plans would be exempt from public distribution. As explained by Committee Counsel Lincoln Wolfe, “The purpose of the bill is to protect sensitive military information from public disclosure, and it specifies that a series of types of documents are exempt from public disclosure, including under the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

Governments in Colorado would get extra days to fulfill citizen requests for public records under proposed legislation that passed its first committee vote last week. News media would get preferential treatment, which caused one lawmaker to vote against the measure. Local governments, from school boards to counties, claimed in testimony before lawmakers that voluminous requests for records crowd out work on other core services. This is Kipp’s second try in as many years to make significant changes to the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA). Last year, a similar bill failed due to concerns from disability advocates, the media and parents of public school students. That bill would have labeled certain citizens as “vexatious requestors,” denying timely access to records. This new bill has removed the “vexatious requestor” elements, and Kipp has added provisions that she said will benefit records requestors as well, like requiring most governments to accept credit card payments for records. Currently, records custodians must respond to requests for documents within three days, and in extenuating circumstances, seven days. This bill would make those deadlines five days and 10 days respectively. The news media would be exempted, and would get records under the shorter deadlines.

President Donald Trump and the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are facing yet another lawsuit, this time for refusing to fulfill Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The civil action, filed by watchdog organization Project On Government Oversight, disputes Trump’s claim that DOGE records are covered by the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and are therefore not publicly accessible via FOIA. “Transparency in what DOGE is doing and why is critical if we are going to hold our public actors accountable,” POGO’s attorney Anne Weismann said. “This lawsuit seeks to achieve that accountability by ensuring the DOGE records are properly preserved and accessible through the Freedom of Information Act.”