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FOIA Friday: Barring reporters from courtrooms and the start of student government meetings • Virginia Mercury [1]

['Staff Report', 'More From Author', '- March']

Date: 2024-03-01

One of the less noticed features of the Virginia Way is the long-running tendency of the commonwealth’s leaders to conduct their decision-making behind closed doors. While the Virginia Freedom of Information Act presumes all government business is by default public and requires officials to justify why exceptions should be made, too many Virginia leaders in practice take the opposite stance, acting as if records are by default private and the public must prove they should be handled otherwise.

In this feature, we aim to highlight the frequency with which officials around Virginia are resisting public access to records on issues large and small — and note instances when the release of information under FOIA gave the public insight into how government bodies are operating.

Richmond’s pattern of noncompliance with FOIA requirements

Emails obtained by TV station WTVR through a Freedom of Information Act request show the city of Richmond is not complying with government transparency laws by frequently missing deadlines set by the state’s FOIA law to provide information to members of the public. On occasion, WTVR reported, the city ignores requests entirely.

The 87 pages of emails “revealed a pattern of City Hall leaders being unresponsive to the city’s former FOIA officer Connie Clay, who was asking for necessary information from them in order to fulfill requests,” WTVR reported.

In particular, the documents show an adversarial relationship between Clay and Richmond Public Relations Director Petula Burks, with Clay repeatedly highlighting missed deadlines and a lack of responses and objecting to decisions by higher-ups about redactions and the provision of information.

By January, Clay “would no longer have a job with the city. Burks said she could not disclose the reason for Clay’s separation, citing personnel privacy.”

WTVR said it scheduled interviews with Burks, who oversees the city’s FOIA office, three times for its story, but Burks cancelled each one. She then provided a written statement saying the city was “in the process of transitioning from a decentralized FOIA system to a centralized transition” and that “once we have adequate staffing, we believe our FOIA processing will improve, and turnaround times will meet expectations.”

JMU’s student government association bars public from start of meeting

James Madison University’s student newspaper The Breeze reported that the schools’ Student Government Association “illegally barred the public, including the media, from the beginning of its meeting Tuesday, with the backing of Vice President for Student Affairs Tim Miller, who incorrectly cited Virginia law.”

According to the Breeze, the association’s faculty adviser informed reporters the Student Government Association’s meeting would begin with a closed session. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act states that closed meetings cannot be held unless the public body involved in the meeting first publicly votes to go into closed session, identifies the subject matter and purpose of the closed meeting and cites one of 46 exemptions in the law that allows bodies to meet in private.

When a reporter asked Miller which exemption was being cited to justify the closed meeting, he responded, “That is not how FOIA works. This is not a document that you can FOIA later.”

Miller is incorrect. Virginia FOIA governs open meetings, not just public documents. Advisory opinions from the Office of the Attorney General and state FOIA Advisory Council have concluded student governments at public universities are subject to the state’s FOIA requirements because they have the authority to allocate money to campus groups.

The Mercury’s efforts to track FOIA and other transparency cases in Virginia are indebted to the work of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government , a nonprofit alliance dedicated to expanding access to government records, meetings and other state and local proceedings.

Richmond judge attempts to block reporters from jury selection

Richmond Judge Reilly Marchant attempted to block reporters from the courtroom during jury selection in the high-profile murder trial of Amari Pollard, who on Thursday afternoon pleaded guilty to killing Huguenot High School graduate Shawn Jackson outside of the graduation ceremony in downtown Richmond.

According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, deputies with the Richmond Sheriff’s Office told reporters Marchant had issued instructions that reporters couldn’t be in the courtroom during selection, typically a public process.

Marchant admitted the reporters after the newspaper “passed along a written note to the bench stating that the newspaper’s legal counsel would be coming to protest the decision to keep out reporters,” the Times-Dispatch wrote.

In a separate case concerning FOIA this January, Marchant ruled that the Richmond School Board had to release an external report it commissioned on the graduation shooting, which left two dead and five others wounded. The board had sought to keep the report secret on the grounds that it was subject to attorney-client privilege.

Records give insight into Patrick County hospital proposal

In Patrick County, Chicago-based company Foresight Health has offered to donate a former hospital to the county if it pays half the expenses the company incurred in trying to revive the facility. Through FOIA requests and other reporting, Cardinal News found that in November 2023, the company emailed Patrick County Administrator Beth Simms a proposal that asked the county to pay $815,000 of $1.63 million in expenses.

A spreadsheet compiled by the company showed more than $450,000 of those expenses were for private jet travel and lodging at a luxury resort. Roughly $22,000 were payments made to the county’s economic development director, whom Foresight simultaneously hired as an official consultant. And over $300,000 was paid to consulting and communications firms.

Simms said the spreadsheet was not provided at the time of the November email.

Foresight chief operating officer Joe Hylak-Reinholtz told Cardinal News Foresight didn’t expect taxpayers to cover the costs of the jet travel or luxury lodgings, saying he had expected negotiations to occur over what could be expensed.

Other records obtained by Cardinal through a FOIA inquiry show Foresight owes nearly $80,000 in delinquent real estate taxes to Patrick. In a December email, the company’s CEO told Simms he wanted to complete the deal with the county by year’s end “to get some tax reductions.”

Have you experienced local or state officials denying or delaying your FOIA request? Tell us about it: [email protected]

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