Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Legislation Recap topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
FOIA council reviews 2025 General Assembly actions, awaits governor decisions
Summary
At its April meeting the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council reviewed 13 FOIA-related bills passed by the General Assembly, discussed new exemptions and implementation steps, and set work items for staff ahead of expected governor action by May 2.
The Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council on April 15 reviewed legislation from the 2025 General Assembly affecting access to public records and meetings and directed staff to prepare implementation plans for several enacted measures.
The council’s executive director, Alan Gerhardt, told members that “the 2025 draft legislative update is posted online” and that 13 bills with FOIA implications passed the legislature this session, though several still awaited the governor’s action by the May 2 deadline. He highlighted a range of enacted and proposed changes, from a new parole board meetings exemption to statutory changes affecting disclosures tied to lottery winners and corrections records.
Why it matters: several of the measures either add new FOIA exemptions or clarify existing ones and could change what local and state agencies must disclose. The council flagged implementation tasks that require policy development or administrative work, including a new training-approval requirement for FOIA officers who are also legal counsel.
Key details: Gerhardt identified several items of immediate operational impact. House Bill 2152 requires any legal counsel who is also designated as a public body's FOIA officer to “complete a training session or online course offered or approved by the FOIA council.” The council asked staff to develop a work plan to create an approval process for outside training providers and to bring that plan back at the council’s next meeting. Gerhardt said the bill was signed and would be effective July 1.
Other measures noted in the recap included: proposed new records exemptions for information submitted to an acute psychiatric bed registry; exemptions for certain proprietary workforce-development information; expanded prohibitions on release for sealed or expunged criminal records; a change lowering the lottery-winner threshold for nondisclosure of winner identity from $10 million to $1 million; and a comprehensive bill on automatic license-plate readers that includes a FOIA exemption for system and audit-trail data and was awaiting the governor’s action.
Council members flagged items they want staff to prioritize. Commissioner discussion focused on the training-approval mandate (HB 2152); Maria Everett and others pointed to existing CLE approval mechanisms as models to adapt, including the Virginia State Bar’s MCLE process. The council directed staff to draft a work plan and return with options for how the council could review or approve outside training providers.
The council also discussed bills referred to it for further study, including measures about agenda posting and late additions to meeting agendas, a proposed exemption for minor participants in state-run programs, and a study request on remote voting and decision-making protocols that arose from a pandemic-preparedness review.
The council did not take substantive statutory changes at the meeting; rather, members assigned follow-up tasks to staff and voted to form or refer some topics to smaller work groups for further development.
