Blogs

I had a citizen-journalist contact me today about a clerk in a rural county who was refusing a request to copy an arrest warrant.

The warrant had already been executed and it had not been sealed (nor was there any pending motion to seal it). The clerk simply he/she would not make copies. The citizen was allowed to look at the warrant, but as soon as he started to make handwritten notes about the warrant, “they took the documents and said writing notes was copying” and thus prohibited.

Two roads cross at “The Busiest Intersection in Virginia”: Money and politics.

So says the promotional brochures for the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), the 13-year-old non-profit founded by David Poole to shine the light on political contributions and political expenditures in Virginia.

The organization, which now boasts three employees and may soon be adding a fourth, recently added data from local elections, and has already begun tracking the progress of the decennial redistricting process.

At the Virginia Coalition for Open Government's annual conference, the panel topics were very different, but there was nonetheless a common thread running through them all.

Panelists and speakers who gathered at the Capitol on Oct. 22 discussed lobbying the General Assembly, access to information on college campuses, government technology, FOIA basics and using FOIA to create prize-winning journalism.

Just about every panel or speaker at some point got around to emphasizing a common element in the access equation: our humanity.

The FOIA Council has had its plate full this summer, studying issues affecting access and the Freedom of Information Act.

Some of the issues are not particularly problematic, more matters of degree or of detail, like figuring out the right language to use for the amount of advance notice a public body must have prior to a FOIA lawsuit’s filing.

Other issues are much more charged, including access to law enforcement records.

I’ve lost count of the articles and editorials I’ve read over the past several months. I’ve even lost count of the localities or boards.

The Albemarle School Board stands out only because it may be the most recent (and, truth be told, because a faithful VCOG member of many years alerted me to it).

From time to time I get calls from reporters who are doing stories about Virginia’s FOIA or public access laws in general. Invariably, I’ll be asked how Virginia rates against other states: is it better, worse, average?

When asked, I tend to limp along in response, hedging here, qualifying there, because it’s really tough to say.

There’s shock value in being among the worst FOIA laws in the country, and there’s pride in being among the best. I know Virginia’s law is in neither extreme. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

It was a busy week in the courts last week for access to government records, and I'm not even talking about the release on Wikileaks of tens of thousands of classified documents related to the war in Afganistan.

Right here in Virginia, three cases in varying stages of litigation were bright on the access horizon.