After nearly three years of study, dozens of regular and committee meetings, and thousands of hours in effort, the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council appears poised to recommend legislation largely unchanged from the dreadful law it was tasked to fix.
The council has posted on its website a reorganized draft of the state’s Freedom of Information Act, the commonwealth’s most important open government statute, and it looks frustratingly similar to existing law.
The Virginia FOIA was last updated in 2000. Since then, it has been weakened by exemptions added by lawmakers at the behest of narrow constituencies. Continue…
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