All Access

The Attorney General's Office filed a friend of the court brief in the FOIA dispute between a Fauquier County citizens group and the Town of Warrenton over the reach of the working papers exemption. The brief argues that there's no limit on what can be considered "correspondence" in that exemption. There's also an argument that the government defendant in a FOIA case can meet the burden of proof for whether an exemption was properly invoked by offering to give the records to the judge for an in camera inspection and then following through by giving the judge any records she asks for.

This brief and others can be found on VCOG's Brief Bank webpage.

Payroll error cost Petersburg schools $140K // Youngkin lawyer appointed to ‘citizen’ seat on FOIA council // Records reveal new Loudoun schools superintendent’s busy travel schedule

More than 85 hours of audio recordings captured the trials that followed Danville’s civil rights movement of 1963 and the sentencing of almost 250 defendants, most of whom were Black. While the audio has existed for decades, it has only recently become available online for anyone to hear.

City officials are withholding documents about a recently revealed conflict of interest for one member of the Roanoke City Council, and the council member isn’t answering questions either. Last week, Councilwoman Vivian Sanchez-Jones abstained from voting on a $5,900 budget amendment for the school division. The schools received some grant money, and the city council accepted that funding, as is standard. But Sanchez-Jones, who works as a student support specialist for Roanoke City Public Schools, read a statement that said she had a personal interest in the item. “This is a result of the recent question dealing with the school funding,” City Attorney Tim Spencer said. “We got a report back from them that — on individual appropriations of just school funds, as well as on the funding formula — that she should refrain.” “The City will not be releasing this information,” Spencer wrote. “Since it is considered attorney-client privilege and work product.”

Documents obtained by The Winchester Star through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveal details of a recent [closed] session of Winchester's City Council that one member challenged as inappropriate. The closed-door session on May 14, according to council's meeting agenda for that day, was to "consult with the city attorney (Melisa Michelsen) regarding the application and enforcement of Common Council standards of decorum and related legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice ..." A total of eight files containing four documents (most files were emails with one or more of the four documents attached) were subsequently shared by the city, but another 39 files were withheld due to attorney-client privilege and one was not released because it was "the correspondence of the chief executive officer of the city," which is City Manager Dan Hoffman. One of the documents, an email from Councilor Richard Bell to Michelsen, was three pages long and completely blacked out except for the very first sentence: "Can you share that language just to see before it goes live?" The most telling of the four documents obtained under FOIA is a letter from Windle to City Council President Kim Herbstritt that claims the closed-door session on May 14 was called by Hoffman because "I had reached out to the Virginia Municipal League for professional development advice in my position as a Winchester City Council member."