While the Virginia Freedom of Information Act allows for some secrecy around political appointments such as the one Isle of Wight County supervisors are about to make to temporarily fill the seat left vacant by the death of colleague William McCarty, the law by no means requires it.

And supervisors must resist any temptation to be less than fully transparent about arguably the most important decision they will make in 2025.

To understand the consequences of secrecy surrounding such decisions, supervisors need look no further than Smithfield, where Jim Collins and Raynard Gibbs never recovered politically from the backroom process a few Town Council members used in 2023 to stack their board after the midterm departures of Renee Rountree and Wayne Hall.  

Collins and Gibbs, arguably through no fault of their own, were ousted a year later by an electorate angry about paternalistic elected leadership that came to see itself as smarter and wiser than the citizens it served.

Before the application deadline for people interested in the Town Council vacancies had even expired, certain council members were already telling people around town that Collins and Gibbs would be appointed. Twenty-plus excellent applicants never had a chance of being appointed, even as the council went through the motions of narrowing the field, in secret, and interviewing, once again in secret, several “finalists” for the vacancies.

County supervisors must do better.

While Virginia FOIA allows discussion about the District 2 vacancy and even secret interviews of prospective appointees, supervisors must commit to complete transparency throughout the process. There’s simply no good reason to meet in closed session for a political appointment. Those who drafted the state’s FOIA law, which spells out a number of circumstances in which a public body can go behind closed doors, very intentionally used the word “may” instead of “shall” to instruct public servants’ use of the closed-session option.

The person who fills the Carrollton-centric District 2 vacancy until the November election could well be the deciding vote on a five-member board that has been divided on the broad topic of growth and development. Citizens have sent a clear and unequivocal message that growth must be better managed and our rural way of life better preserved than the current Board of Supervisors and past Town Council have done.

Therefore, in addition to the “announcement” of candidates scheduled for this week, prospective interim appointees should be interviewed in public, and the format should allow citizens, especially Carrollton residents, to ask their own questions and hear the candidates’ responses.

We have no idea whether the person who is appointed to fill McCarty’s seat until the election will run to keep the seat for the remaining two years of the term. But his or her odds of success at the ballot box hinge greatly on the transparency of county supervisors in making the interim appointment.