This is a case worth watching, as this issue bedevils FOI advocates across the country: officials using e-mail to skirt open meetings laws…
Virginia’s Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Monday in a case arising from Fairfax County schools that could impose new limits on how elected officials use e-mail to discuss public business.
The key question is whether hundreds of e-mails, which Fairfax School Board members sent to one another before a controversial vote to close Clifton Elementary School, constituted secret meetings in violation of the state Freedom of Information Act…
In the Fairfax case, justices will have to determine whether School Board members’ e-mails involved “virtually simultaneous interaction.”
That is the standard the state Supreme Court set in 2004, when it decided that e-mails sent among Fredericksburg City Council members — at intervals ranging from four hours to two days apart — were not “virtually simultaneous” and thus did not count as a meeting.
Filed under: 3. Access law, 7. Electronic records, Open meetings laws Tagged: e-mail, open meetings laws, Virginia
