17 pages of FULLY REDACTED emails
This is the City of Suffolk’s response to a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for emails between the former City Manager, Al Moor, and Fire Marshal Cornwell regarding amendments to the City’s fire code. Changes to the code were approved by a 7-1 City Council vote on May 7, 2025 despite the Fire Marshal’s objections to certain aspects of the changes (read about this more here.)
Why would email correspondence between the City Manager’s office and the Fire Marshal’s office need to be FULLY REDACTED? The City likes to tout transparency, yet when a citizen requested email to better understand changes to fire safety standards, the City invoked City Attorney-Client privilege. Why would this be necessary?
Changing the fire code was done at the direction of the City Manager’s office and then approved by the majority of City Council. If this was a positive step for Suffolk, what is there to hide?
A follow-up email was sent by the requesting citizen to the FOIA office regarding the fully redacted emails:
No written response was provided to this email, but we were told that this redacted file was going back to the city attorney’s office for review to determine if any changes could be made to the redactions. It has been about a month since then without any updates.
To quote from the Virginia Coalition for Open Government’s FOIA Citizens Guide:
“Virginia’s FOIA starts from the presumption that all government records and meetings are open and available to the public. A record cannot be withheld and a meeting cannot be closed unless a specific exemption applies, or unless some other statute in Virginia law applies. Just because an exemption could apply, however, doesn’t mean it must. Exemptions are discretionary, and they must be interpreted narrowly to increase awareness of all citizens of government activities. (§2.2-3700)”
Citizens deserve to know how and why the City determines what changes to make to the legal code. Fully redacted emails are the opposite of transparency.