The Chesapeake City Council convened for a work session at 5:00 p.m. on February 11, 2025, to conduct annual Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) training and discuss the South Norfolk Design Guidelines. The regular meeting began at 6:30 p.m., covering consent and regular agenda items, public comments, appointments, and new business. All council members were present. The meeting included a closed session from 7:39 p.m. to 8:43 p.m.
Everyone to our February the 11th, 2025 council work session. We have a couple of items which manager will introduce to this time. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'll first turn it over to City Attorney Linley to go through your annual Virginia Freedom of Information Act training. Good evening. I am here to discuss the Freedom of Information Act. And if you will indulge me one acronym, I will probably refer to it as FOIA throughout the presentation, but I will try to not use any other acronyms. So if I do, give me the look. Alright, so to begin, what is FOIA? FOIA is basically Virginia Code statutes that collectively combine to make what is called the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. And the purpose of all of these statutes is to ensure that Virginia citizens have ready access to open public meetings and access to public records. The standard for construction and application of FOIA is that it should be liberally construed to promote awareness and the opportunity for citizens to witness the operation and activities of its government. So why do you need to have training? The Virginia FOIA does require that as a member of a public body, which is city council, you are required to have this training within two months of assuming office and every two years thereafter. And for your knowledge, the city clerk is gracious enough to always keep records of these trainings, which is another law or legal requirement. As we did learn in the FOIA case from last year, the failure to provide this training doesn't constitute a penalty that's punishable by the courts, but obviously it's a legal requirement that we still respectfully oblig and are obligated to follow. So to begin with the basics, FOIA is basically comprised of two components meetings and records. And so this slide just lays out the basic rules that we're going to go over throughout this presentation. In the case of meetings, all meetings should be open and available to the public unless a specific legal exemption is met that justifies the city council entering closed session and discussing the topic in private. Any open meeting or any meeting at all actually must receive adequate notice to the public, which should include the date, time and location of the meeting. Any material should be made available to the public at the same time that the city council is provided the materials. Minutes must be taken at all public meetings as regarding records. All public records of the city are supposed to be provided upon the written request or verbal request, any type of request from any Virginia citizen or vent Virginia media entity. And if we receive a request of that nature, with the typical response is that we must provide a response within five days. But I'll go into the details of that a little bit more in the presentation. And much like the exemptions for closed meeting, if we are going to withhold a record or redact portions of a record, we must cite an exemption that is provided in the law allowing us to take that action. So to begin with public meetings, um, first I just want to say this is a definition of a public meeting. And a meeting is basically happening when three or more council members are assembled and they are transacting or discussing public business. Now, you note that I put an asterisk up by one. At least three members are assembled. That's only just to point out the fact that if two members of a council are delegated to form a committee and they perform functions on behalf of the body, then that can also constitute a meeting under FOIA. So just to be clear about that, for purposes of the presentation, though I'm only going to continue talking about three or more members. So if three or four more members are present, is the first requirement for a public meeting to occur. The next requirement is public business is transacted or discussed. Now, public business previously was not defined in the Freedom of Information Act, but we had a Virginia Supreme Court case in 2023, Glossy Wheeler, that then put out a definition for public business that was pretty ambiguous. It basically said public business means anything that is pending or reasonably likely to come before a body in the foreseeable future. As you can imagine, that type of ambiguous nature is not favorable, and so a lot of lawyers were concerned about it. The General Assembly responded, and in 2024, they did put out a new definition of public business that is more narrow. And so now the definition of public business is anything that a governing body would undertake or propose to undertake. So it's much more reasonable in in terms of its scope, but there is still some vague nature to the term public business. Obviously, communications can happen over Zoom, through text, you can have phone calls with people. So while the Virginia code has not kept up with technology, the case law has. So that means if you have a Zoom meeting with three council meeting members and you discuss public business, then that was a meeting and it should have been properly noticed. If you have text messages, if they happen in real time or there's some simultaneous component, which one case identified as responses within two to three minutes, that could possibly be construed as a meeting too. So I would just exercise caution in all respects whenever you have three or more council meeting members assembled in some capacity, whether physically or electronically, and you're discussing or transacting public business. The final point I just wanted to make is there are some exemptions from the definition of meeting in FOIA, and that includes campaign events, informational gatherings, meetings of other public bodies, and debates or similar events. So now to discuss why that matters. It matters in how you define a meeting because an open meeting has specific rules that apply to it. So as we kind of briefly touched on at the beginning, if you have a meeting, three or more members discussing transacting public business, then these statutes come into play.