A small committee going line-by-line through Virginia's open records laws decided to punt Thursday on a months-long effort to rein in one of the laws vaguest sets of rules.
These are the parts of Virginia Freedom of Information's Act that deal with proprietary records and trade secrets – the things government keeps secret on behalf of private companies it works with. State Supreme Court Justice William C. Mims wrote in a 2014 opinion that the current law is too confusing to be consistently applied, but an effort to rework things foundered on the objections of state agencies and private sector lobbyists fighting for the status quo. Continue…
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