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Legislation is advancing in the Virginia General Assembly that would rename the Fort Monroe Authority’s executive director as the authority’s chief executive officer. The change appears semantic. But it has raised questions about whether the title change will expand the types of records the authority can exclude from disclosure under the state’s open records law. State code grants exceptions for Freedom of Information Act requests. It allows specific public bodies, such as the “chief executive officer of any political subdivision of the Commonwealth,” to exclude working papers and correspondence from FOIA requests. Phyllis Terrell, a spokesperson for the Fort Monroe Authority, said she didn’t believe getting around FOIA law was part of the motivation in the title change.

Frederick County School Board member Ellen White (Red Bud) on Wednesday expressed her “dissent” during a joint work session with the county’s Board of Supervisors because the session was not video recorded. Not making the meeting available for public viewing, she said, “does nothing” for “transparency.” The Feb. 7 session at the County Administration Building lasted about two hours and covered a number of topics, including a presentation by Frederick County Public Schools Superintendent George Hummer of his fiscal 2025 budget proposal.

Video obtained exclusively by CBS 6 reveals the interactions between a mentally ill hospital patient and Richmond Police, medical staff, and security just 36 hours before the man would be killed during an encounter with Chesterfield Police. For the first time publicly, the body camera footage shows exactly what led a Richmond police officer to arrest and remove 34-year-old Charles Byers from the hospital while Byers was under a court order to receive involuntary psychiatric treatment. Richmond Police initially declined to release the body camera footage when requested by CBS 6 through the Freedom of Information Act, but the video has now been submitted as evidence in a civil case.

Two fired FirstEnergy Corp. executives were indicted Monday in the long-running investigation into a $60 million bribery scheme in Ohio that has already resulted in a 20-year prison sentence for former state House Speaker Larry Householder. Former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and former Senior Vice President Michael Dowling were charged in relation to their roles in the massive corruption case, Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced in an online news conference. All were accused of using the $60 million in secretly funded FirstEnergy cash to get Householder’s chosen Republican candidates elected to the House in 2018 and then to help him get elected speaker in January 2019. The money was then used to win passage of the tainted energy bill, House Bill 6, and to conduct what authorities have said was a $38 million dirty-tricks campaign to prevent a repeal referendum from reaching the ballot.