Opportunities lost
Legislators missed big chances to champion the public's right to know
Every legislative session starts out with a cannon blast of new proposals. Lobbyists and advocates spend the first week of the legislative session hunched over their keyboards, poring through bills, searching for keywords, reading the italicized and struck-through language, trying to figure out if this is a bill they need to follow. VCOG is no different, and when the deadline for new proposals finally passed, 60 bills were on our watch list. Some of those 60 were duplicates, and some of them were not of major concern. But others had me excited for the promise of more access and transparency for the public.
I spent most of my time on bills that had the most impact on the public’s right to know. Either they directly amended an important part of FOIA, or they were written into other sections of the code. I lobbied for several bills, lobbied against others, and many I just hoped to get amended to a narrower focus before they went any further.
Below is a run-down of some of the session’s highs and lows.
Opportunities lost
SB876: After it passed the Senate unanimously, a House subcommittee killed VCOG’s bill that tried to cut back on boards acting on items added to an agenda during a meeting. The bill will be sent to the FOIA Council for study. The primary opposition came from Fairfax County and a parliamentarian, who said the bill was “vague.”
SB1029: This was the FOIA fee reform bill that came out of a 6-meeting FOIA Council study this past fall. More than 30 governments and government associations participated in those meetings, but in the end, individual local governments torpedoed it. After making it through the Senate and a House committee, the bill died on a voice vote when it came up for final passage on the House floor.
SB1481: This is another bill whose genesis was in a study committee. It would have required state universities that use animals in their research to prepare regular reports about the life and outcome of lab animals, particularly rats and mice. It was left in a Senate Committee without a vote after it was established that there was no corresponding budget amendment.
HB2140: This bill would have required the Department of Elections to create a user-friendly, searchable, sortable database of campaign finance reports and their expenditures/receipts. The measure passed the House unanimously and unanimously passed the Senate General Laws Committee, only to be killed in the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan vote.
Opportunities gained
HB2039 (Simon): Directs the FOIA Council to work with experts to develop a model policy for use of encrypted communications by law enforcement. The stated goal is to leave some channels publicly accessible.
HB2152 (Carr): This is a bill VCOG proposed. It says attorneys who are also FOIA officers have to get training from the FOIA Council or another source the council approves (like a bar association continuing education class).
HB2452 (Hodges): On the one hand, this bill is good because it directs the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia to work up standards for the livestreaming of university board meetings. On the other, the bill started out as making this into law because there was a study and supposed standards in 2021 that haven’t been implemented. But higher ed successfully argued that it would cost ungodly amounts of money and again convicned lawmakers that they just needed more time to keep studying how to make meetings electronically accessible to the public in the same way that local governments and school boards have been doing for years.
SB1127 (Boysko): Requires higher ed to post USDA notices of violations found at university research facilities using animals. The bill grants latitude for universities to redact trade secrets or other FOIA-exempt material, but the report as a whole must be made available online.
HB1763 (Martinez): This bill would have let so-called “advisory bodies” meet all-virtually 100% of the time. That is, never any in-person meetings. The patron withdrew the bill before it was heard in subcommittee.
HB1944 (Seibold): Despite a massive reworking to the legal notice provisions though the Code Commission and with full local government involvement, this bill proposed to allow all public notices to be placed on government websites instead of in newspapers or newspaper websites. The bill died for lack of a motion to pass it.
The losses on our agenda bill and the FOIA fee bill were hard. On the agenda bill, I worked with the lobbyists for the Virginia Municipal League, the City of of Alexandria, the planning districts association, the Virginia Press Association, the Virginia Railway Express and the Northern Virginia Technology Council. We amended the original bill to make it clear that additions could be acted on if they were time-sensitive. With those changes, the Virginia Association of Counties dropped their opposition, and the school boards association did not protest it. We thought, hey! a couple of no votes from Senators is OK, so long as we’re all in agreement.
Then we got to the House, where localities with large numbers of delegates can exert more influence over legislation they don’t like. And Fairfax didn’t like this bill, even though I didn’t learn of their opposition until after “crossover” (when the House bills go to the Senate and vice versa). Suddenly “time-sensitive” was seen as problematic. Meanwhile, I worked with representatives from Arlington County to address their concerns. At the meeting, though, Arlington said, yes, their concerns were addressed but they weren’t taking a position on the bill.
Sigh.
I was more than disappointed that the subcommittee sent the bill to the FOIA Council for study. But the disappointment turned to pique when a FOIA Council-study bill (SB1029) was killed at the very last opportunity. AND ON A VOICE VOTE. It leaves me less than enthusiastic about participating in another study where the various associations representing government groups (like VML, VACO, the Council of School Attorneys or the Commissioners of the Revenue Association) negotiate in good faith, only to have their individual members work against the final product.
Next year is another opportunity, but I think Virginians deserved better this year.