A candidate for Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors on Monday hammered the board for continually shutting the public and the media out of discussions on a planned Metrorail extension, calling the closed-door briefings “a serious violation of the public interest.”
Charlie Hall, who is challenging Providence District Supervisor Linda Smyth in the June Democratic primary, is the latest to question the legality of the board’s use of closed sessions to discuss the multibillion-dollar Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project.
The board has gone into the exclusive meetings to discuss the project on at least three occasions in recent months — most recently on Monday to be briefed by staff members from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.
“The board has been specifically challenged on its legal justification for these closed-door meetings, and yet the supervisors continue to hold them,” Hall said in a statement issued the same day. “The bottom line is that people have a right to know about decisions that will affect their everyday lives. There is no legitimate reason to keep this process hidden from the public.”
In its justifications for closed sessions, the board has repeatedly cited a provision in the Virginia Freedom of Information Act that allows closed meetings for “actual or pending litigation” or specific legal matters. Documents obtained by The Examiner in recent weeks, however, show the board discussed fiscal and policy topics that open-meeting experts say fall outside the scope of the law.
The Arlington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press calls the board’s justifications illegitimate.
“The board of supervisors obviously does not care about following Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act if they continue to meet in secret on these matters,” said Loren Cochran, a lawyer with the group.
Fairfax County is a major funding partner in the Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, which will run 23 miles of new track from west Falls Church to Loudoun County. The first half of the project alone is expected to cost as much as $2.7 billion.
Smyth and Board of Supervisors Chairman Gerald Connolly, both of whom were in budget meetings all day, could not be reached for comment.
