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With three months left to go in the current fiscal year, the King George County Board of Supervisors has exceeded its budget for office supplies by at least $10,000, largely due to purchases made in December of 2023 and January of this year, after the November election ushered in new Board leadership. While spending on this line item has exceeded the budgeted amount, new Board Chair T.C. Collins has asked other county departments to justify their spending. In December, according to invoices received by the Advance through a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the county purchased three new Microsoft Surface Studio 2 laptops for the new Board members, each costing $2,670.85 plus a four-year business protection plan of $399. In January, according to emails the Advance received through a FOIA request, Collins directed the Finance Department to provide him with a list of all county-owned vehicles, excepting ambulances, police cars and fire trucks, and then asked David Moody, the county's fire and rescue chief, to have his chief officers provide written justification for having take-home vehicles.

Black students in Powhatan County told the county School Board on Monday evening that they are sick of being called racial slurs at school and on their school bus. The School Board suspended a meeting last week because of overcrowding and rescheduled it for Monday at Powhatan High School to accommodate the big turnout. Monday night’s meeting was tense at times, and law enforcement escorted two people out of the room, one of whom called board members white supremacists. At one point, an argument escalated between School Board Chair James Taylor and meeting attendees over whether policy allows an advocate who is not a Powhatan resident to speak on behalf of a resident.

A Danville City Council rule requires citizens to register four days ahead of time in order to comment publicly on a topic not on the agenda during a Danville City Council meeting. They must sign up online or contact the city clerk by noon the Friday before a Tuesday night meeting, according to the policy. While it’s normal for local governing entities to have rules for public comment to streamline meetings and give everyone a chance to voice their opinions, sometimes those policies can be too restrictive, said Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. “I see this as another example of these public bodies trying to make their meetings more efficient and to accommodate as many people as they need to, but going too far by then making it unnecessarily difficult for citizens to participate,’ Rhyne told the Danville Register & Bee. Danville is “definitely not unique” in having rules regarding public comment, she added.

In a Feb. 29 story, Times-Dispatch reporter Anna Bryson asked Petersburg schools spokesman Terrance Dixon who the superintendent is, whether there is an acting superintendent or the status of Superintendent Tamara Sterling, among other questions. Dixon declined to answer, saying the district cannot comment on personnel matters. That’s an overly broad copout in my view. “Yes, she’s still on leave,” Kenneth Pritchett, chair of the Petersburg School Board, told me Thursday. “And we hope to have something for you, at least by, hopefully by tomorrow, and we’ll let you know more.” After Bryson — in the wake of unreturned phone calls, voicemails, text messages and emails over the course of several days — showed up in the visitors’ area of Pritchett’s state-agency workplace, the board chair called her editor and raised the prospect of seeking a restraining order against her. When a superintendent vanishes without a trace, it’s news. The public has a right to the when and why of the matter, whether this state of affairs was triggered by a wild hair of the board or alleged misfeasance or malfeasance by the superintendent.

UVA shooting report that university is still withholding cost $1.5 million // Richmond charges $3,866 to review emails related to FOIA requests // How Virginia FOIA has been strengthened over the years

In Tax Analysts vs. Matthew Irby, West Virginia State Tax Commissioner, the justices ruled the Tax Department couldn't just say its audit manuals were off limits without explaining why. Chief Justice Tim Armstead authored the unanimous opinion that dropped on Friday of Sunshine Week. The ruling came with three important syllabus points. — Courts should apply much more latitude in granting disclosure than they do in granting exemptions; — If a government agency says it doesn't have to disclose material under an exemption, it has the burden of proof, not the FOIA requester; — Government agencies that claim exemptions don't require disclosure must produce a Vaughn index.

After the Florida Supreme Court held that Marsy’s Law can’t be used to hide the identities of law enforcement who used deadly force, the Tallahassee Police Department is refusing to release the name and personnel file for one of two officers at the heart of the landmark case. The Tallahassee Police Department has denied multiple requests from the Tallahassee Democrat for basic information about one of the two officers. The department declined to release even a single page of his personnel file, citing a “secondary” public records exemption rather than Marsy’s Law as it had previously.

In the summer of 2022, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press started an ambitious project to remedy the informational deficit surrounding Glomar (“neither confirm nor deny” that responsive records exist), using (of course) FOIA requests. Specifically, the Reporters Committee wrote FOIA requests asking for response letters from agencies to requesters that included a number of phrases associated with the Glomar response and sent between fiscal years 2017 and 2021. The requests also gave agencies the option to simply report the number of Glomar responses issued each fiscal year, along with the exemption they were tied to. The Reporters Committee submitted the request to every federal department, agency, and subcomponent thereof across the government, totalling hundreds of submissions. Today, the Reporters Committee is releasing a snapshot of the results of those requests, an unprecedented look at how federal government agencies invoke the Glomar doctrine to deny FOIA requests. This analysis represents, to our knowledge, the first systematic review of Glomar responses in contemporary FOIA practice.

It has been 8 years since FOIA laws were last revised. Passed at a time when the iPhone 7 was in popular demand, technologies and expectations of the user experience have come a long way. Investments in policy, people, and processes are critical to improve a law whose utility has not yet reached its full potential. This was a cornerstone of my tenure while I served as the chief FOIA officer at the Homeland Security Department. FOIA should be updated again to create a uniform compliance framework for all agencies subject to the law, similar to how the National Institute of Standards and Technology offers a standardized cybersecurity and privacy compliance framework. Loosely coining this effort, the FOIA Compliance Framework , it would provide uniformity and consistency among the entirety of the federal government to enhance FOIA’s transparency mandate.