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Commonwealth's attorney Douglas Baumgardner announced this week that he will ask the state’s Attorney General to settle the dispute with the county school board over access to documents.
The issue arose when first the Rappahannock News and then Rappahannock's chief executive officer asked the school board for copies of an architectural report and budget analysis on construction of the proposed central office and vehicle maintenance facility.
On advice of its special legal counsel, the board declined to release the documents on the grounds that they are exempt from disclosure under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
The issue of what is and is not covered by FOI is much more important than these documents. And it's an issue that must be settled if the press and the public are to have free access to the workings of the governmental unit that controls expenditure of approximately threequarters of the county’s money.
Last year, the superintendent of schools declined to release his preliminary budget for 1982-83 on the grounds that it was a working document. Last month, the school board first refused to disclose a report on an index pay scale proposal for school employees for that same reason. The report was later released but only with the proviso from the board that the release came only because there were no compelling reasons to keep the report secret—not because the press had a right to have it.
This same scenorio will be repeated again and again without a directive to the contrary. We believe that the Attorney General’s ruling will provide that directive. Gerald Baliles was one of the major architects of the Freedom of Information Act, writing its policy provisions, notice provisions and penalty provisions as both a member of the General Assembly and a Deputy Attorney General. If anyone should know its intent, he should.
In a speech last June at a local government and media conference in Charlottesville, Baliles stated “The Virginia Freedom of Information Act is important because it provides access to public information and it is on the basis of that information that one examines, reflects and debates and judges the value of an idea, the work of a program or the validity of a public action.”
He recalled Thomas Jefferson, “a man of extraordinary abilities who not only believed in education but insisted upon its dissemination, and that
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