UPDATE: All three bills noted below were approved Feb. 8 by the committee. In the process, SB 552, which started off dealing just with law enforcement, has now been changed to prohibit the release of names in connection with salary for all government employees.
FURTHER UPDATE: By the time it passed the House, SB 552 had again been amended to remove the reference to all employees. The bill now solely refers to the names/training records of law enforcement.
The Virginia Coalition for Open Government is pleased to announce the winners of its 2015 open government awards. The three winners represent the public, government and media, and all have worked on the same issue: access to court-case information.
Let’s clear up this so-called confusion about whether the personnel exemption (or any other exemption) is mandatory.
This “problem” arises in the context of the ABC refusing to release the results of the State Police’s investigation of the ABC officer who arrested UVA student Martese Johnson. The investigation clears the officer, but ABC is refusing to release the report.
The estimate in this response is for $40,000 and it suffers from the same problems noted in the previous post: a vague explanation for how the hourly salary rate was derived, and faulty logic that the exact same employees who search their records will also need to spend time reviewing their results (that is, many will have no responsive records).