APPOMATTOX  Less than a week after the Association of Local Government Attorneys said a judge had misinterpreted FOIA, the county board abandoned its effort to overturn the judge's ruling. The county already had spent $10,000 in legal fees, and supervisors apparently were willing to give up the fight as long as LGA was on record as saying it was the victim of a bad ruling. At issue was telephone polling by the county manager to see if the board wanted to appeal an order involving court-ordered courthouse improvements. FOIA allows one-on-one informal polling, but visiting Judge Robert T. S. Colby said in this case the polling constituted an illegal vote.

BEDFORD  With the county split sharply over a costly school project in the Lynchburg suburbs, school board members resorted to "daisy-chain" meetings to circumvent FOIA rules for public meetings. Superintendent James Blevins met privately with one of two members at a time, and two members met with architects. A reporter quoted Blevins as saying the purpose was to give each member equal time to air concerns before a public discussion two to three weeks later. Two members of a public body are allowed to discuss public business privately, as long as the public body has five members or more.

BLACKSBURG  Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors drew a firestorm of protests when it stopped affirmative-action programs and restricted free-speech assembly  without inviting public comment or giving prior public notice. Neither issue was on the board's advance agenda for a March 10 meeting, and even board members and top administrators were caught unaware. Damage control quickly followed, with a rollback of both actions. To avoid future surprises, the board approved a policy a month later that guarantees members at least three days to review proposed resolutions and policy changes. Del. Chip Woodrum (D-Roanoke) reminded the board that public policy deserves public discussion. The Roanoke Times observed, "Transparency before the fact, rather than after, might have been no less controversial. But it would have produced a more thoughtful result. The visitors should keep that in mind."

CHESAPEAKE  If you work in city hall, you can't talk to reporters unless PR folks are at your side. A new city policy requires employees to clear all media contacts with the Public Communications Department, even if the question is routine. "City policy, budget, potentially controversial subjects, ongoing or potential litigation" all are off-limits for employee comment. "Efforts by (Chesapeake) to centralize and pre-approve all contacts with news reporters poorly serve constituents by stifling dissent and impeding the flow of information to the public," the Society of Professional Journalists said. "A carefully controlled message may make a city manager's or mayor's job more secure, but it does nothing for the security of citizens," said Robert Leger, president of SPJ. "Any policy that threatens city employees with being fired for speaking the truth is an insult to the First Amendment and to the citizens the city government is supposed to serve."

GRAYSON COUNTY  After a 40-minute closed meeting, Superintendent Kester Greene said the school board talked about "all of the schools of Grayson County and how they could be renovated." Noted the Galax Gazette: "No part of the Freedom of Information Act allows this broad topic to be closed to public discussion. They should have closed only the portion of the meeting dealing with the purchase or sale of a specific piece of property."

HAMPTON ROADS  City managers, county administrators and planning district staff tossed out a reporter when they met in late June to draw up a plan for road construction, including financing. Arthur Collins, director of the planning district commission, insisted it was a staff meeting, not a public body, and thus exempt from open-meeting rules. To make matters worse, Collins ordered doors to be locked and told the reporter, "This is my building"  forgetting, apparently, it was paid for with taxpayer money. Virginia Beach City Manager James Spore sided with Collins, blocking others in the group from even considering if the meeting should be open. According to Maria Everett, executive director of the FOI Advisory Council, the law required it to be open; as the reporter had argued, the group had been formally created as an advisory committee of the Metropolitan Planning Organization. In a next-day editorial, The Daily Press recalled that trust  or lack of it  had been a major factor in last fall's defeat of a proposed highway tax.

MANASSAS  Although a 17-year-old nonprofit group known as Historic Manassas Inc. runs that city's visitors bureau and organizes major city events, its board meets privately. When a group is supported principally by public funds, it must comply with the state's open-meeting rules. The office of the attorney general has defined principally to mean 51 percent; the FOI Advisory Council interprets it at least in some cases to mean two-thirds. An HMI official estimated the group's public funding to be 48 percent. Yet financial reports showed almost 60 percent of its income came from taxpayers  even after excluding a huge sum received to manage a city facility.

PURCELLVILLE  After a contentious local election and months of public wrangling over local development issues (in this case, water and sewer extensions), the mayor and three council members met privately at a councilman's home. FOI violations then got added to the town's troubles, amid continued bickering and name-calling (political foes got labeled "scumbags" and "dirtbags"). Finally, tempers cooled. The council agreed to take part in mid-June in a public FOIA training session.

RICHMOND  Prodded by the legislature, the state's Solid Waste Management Board invoked a supposed threat of litigation to go into closed session, then apparently watered down its regulations for barges that haul huge loads of New York garbage up Virginia's James River. Earlier lawsuits overturned the state's attempts to ban the barge traffic. Critics were told a "settlement" had been approved to avoid new lawsuits, but not even a legislative committee could learn the terms. Campaign Virginia, an environmental group, asked the governor and the attorney general for documents disclosing how much trash would be hauled, how much revenue would be raised in barge fees, and whether fees were to be capped. The AG missed its FOIA reporting deadline, then said any such information was a confidential work product or attorney-client privilege. The governor's office never answered.

RICHMOND  The Virginia Department of Corrections removed a report from its Web site that showed a big jump in serious incidents (including simple assault, rape and murder) in state prisons. A department spokesman said the report was incomplete and inaccurate, and "should have never been put online." Accurate, comparable figures are not available because the department is in the midst of changing "methodologies" and switching to a new electronic data system, the spokesman said.

RICHMOND  When six new members took their places on the Richmond School Board, they promptly vowed to speak only during the board's public meetings. Reporters were told to expect a "no comment" at other times. The board also asked the legislature to outlaw unauthorized leaks from closed meetings. That proposed gag order went nowhere; foes noted it could violate free-speech guarantees and trample rights of political minorities. A returning member, Reggie Malone, said he'd continue "to speak and vote my conscience."

RICHMOND  Ed Matricardi, former executive director of the state Republican Party, pleaded guilty to a single count of wire interception for listening in on a Democratic Party conference call. A federal judge all but ignored his claim that he merely eavesdropped on what should have been a public discussion under the state Freedom of Information Act.

ROANOKE  School officials drastically under-reported 1999-2001 incidents of crime and violence on school property. Numbers were far lower than ones reported by police. Officials conceded they incorrectly handled the earlier reports. A Roanoke Times editorial said, "Whether underreporting was deliberate or simply an administrative effort is less important than providing a true picture of conditions." An in-school police officer got reassigned (temporarily) to a midnight traffic shift after publicly discussing the school-violence problem.

RURAL RETREAT  When a town government's various committees meet behind a locked door, can they still claim they're complying with open-meeting laws? Not hardly. The front door of the town office building apparently gets locked whenever offices close. Officials use their keys to get in the building to hold meetings; citizens complained they're being locked out.

VIRGINIA BEACH  When the police union's Ray Bach sought the results of an employee survey, City Manager James K. Spore gave him a "draft letter" he later sent to all city employees, accusing Bach of misusing FOIA to violate the survey's promise of confidentiality. Bach's attorney took the issue to the state's Freedom of Information Advisory Council. In a strongly worded opinion, the city was told it had no right to promise blanket confidentiality  and that it ought to quit discouraging employees from exercising rights that FOIA extends to all Virginia citizens.

VIRGINIA BEACH  For a story on the 10 highest paid teachers in South Hampton Roads, a reporter needed detailed information about teachers' years of service and education levels, broken down by individual schools. Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Suffolk and Norfolk readily made records available. Not Virginia Beach, which cited "privacy" concerns, even though it had disclosed the same information in years past. The reporter still got the information, simply by calling the Virginia Beach teachers who made the top 10 list - and getting from them the information the division would not provide.

WINCHESTER  Police Chief Gary W. Reynolds was fined $100 for failing to respond to a FOIA request. The request came from the father of a youth convicted eight years earlier in the slaying of a Shenandoah University basketball player. The father, Franklin Washington, has been trying to exonerate his son through a personal investigation. General District Court Judge David Whitacre agreed the police chief had sole discretion about releasing police evidence, but he imposed the $100 civil penalty for Reynolds' failure to respond to Washington in five days, as required by FOIA.