On February 19, the House of Delegates rereferred SB 1029 (Roem) back to the House General Laws Committee on a voice vote, effectively ending the bill’s journey for the year. As previously reported, this legislation is a revised version of past bills introduced by the patron and opposed by VACo to provide free or reduced requester fees for FOIA requests to public bodies. The introduced version of SB 1029 is based on a workgroup of stakeholders that held several meetings over the past year under the umbrella of the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Council. The Council did not take a position on the bill as it lacked a quorum at its last meeting before the session. The bill limits the fees that can be charged for producing public records to the median hourly rate of pay of employees of the public body, or the actual hourly rate of pay of the person performing the work, whichever is less. It also provides that a public body may petition a court for relief from this fee limit, if there is no one who can process the request at the median hourly rate of pay or less.
The bill also amends existing law providing that a public body may petition a court for additional time to respond to a request for public records to allow such petitions to be heard in either general district or circuit court, to give such petitions priority on the court’s docket, and to toll the response time while such a petition is pending before a court. As part of the workgroup, the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory (FOIA) Council staff has published best practices guides pertaining to access to public records under FOIA, FOIA charges, and making requests for public records.
VACo Contacts: Jeremy R. Bennett and Phyllis Errico, Esq., CAE