The VPM Daily Newscast contains all your Central Virginia news in just 5 to 10 minutes. Episodes are recorded the night before.
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Here’s a recap of the top stories on the morning of March 13, 2025:
Hanover County, Sheriff David Hines lose FOIA case appeal
Reported by VPM News’ Lyndon German
The Hanover County Sheriff's Office will have to turn over information about its deputies following a successful appeal by a pro-transparency researcher who requested public records nearly two years ago.
A panel of three judges in the Virginia Court of Appeals (COVA) reviewed a yearslong case against the department, which withheld information about its staff when responding to a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request filed by Alice Minium in August 2023.
Minium — one of the founders of OpenOversight VA, which bills itself as “Virginia’s only statewide police transparency database” — requested “a roster of all sworn law enforcement employees on payroll.”
HCSO initially withheld the names of every deputy below the rank of captain, claiming a VFOIA exemption on the grounds that since any deputy could be deployed undercover in the future, disclosing their names could harm the department’s ability to conduct undercover operations.
A trial court in Hanover sided with Hanover County and Sheriff David Hines in December 2023, but in a ruling this February, the COVA panel determined Hanover didn’t provide enough evidence that Minium's request would put its undercover officers in danger to merit a VFOIA exemption.
“[The] County presented no evidence that any particular deputy had worked undercover, was currently working undercover, or was slated to work undercover on a specific operation,” Judge Junious P. Fulton III wrote in the opinion. “The only evidence presented was that all deputies might hypothetically serve as undercover officers in the future.”
Future funding for military climate change plans caught in fury of Trump cuts
Reported by Inside Climate News’ Charles Paullin
After years of planning to deal with climate change at some of the country’s military bases, local Northern Virginia government officials are seeking funding for climate adaptation that, at this point, may or may not materialize.
Robert Lazaro, executive director of the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, said climate change is a reality that manifests itself most frequently in rainstorms that dump inches of water across the region. “It goes without saying,” he added. “We see it all the time.”
The NVRC, a collection of governments from Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford counties, earlier received about $2.4 million in funding from the Department of Defense’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation for Military Installation Resilience Review planning at several locations along the Potomac River, including the Marine Corps Base in Quantico. (Military installations are required by law to plan for resilience.)
That funding has gone toward two completed phases of the MIRR process, which identified strategies and guidelines to deal with increasing temperatures, rising seas and large volumes of rainfall. But it remains unclear, given the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal spending and stamp out work on climate change, whether funding will progress for a third MIRR phase.
News you might have missed from around the commonwealth
- GOP leaders back Sen. Mark Peake for state party chairman (Richmond Times-Dispatch)*
- Charlottesville draft city budget prioritizes education, affordable housing, and transportation (C-Ville Weekly)
- For residents of Manchester, Fulton and Highland Park, pharmacies are increasingly hard to reach (The Richmonder)
- Former Richmond CAO Lincoln Saunders lands public affairs, consulting gig (Richmond BizSense)*
