FOIA: Your Rights and Loudoun County’s Responsibilities

Your FOIA Rights

The Code of Virginia provide certain rights to residents of the Commonwealth related to FOIA.

• You have the right to request to inspect or receive copies of public records, or both.
• You have the right to request that any charges for the requested records be estimated in advance.
• If you believe that your FOIA rights have been violated, you may file a petition in district or circuit court to compel compliance with FOIA. Alternatively, you may contact the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council for a nonbinding advisory opinion.

Loudoun County's Responsibilities in Responding to Your Request

Loudoun County must respond to your request within five working days of receiving it. "Day One" is considered the day after your request is received. The five-day period does not include weekends or holidays.

The reason behind your request for public records from Loudoun County is irrelevant, and you do not have to state why you want the records before we respond to your request. FOIA does, however, allow Loudoun County to require you to provide your name and legal address.

Response from Loudoun County

FOIA requires that Loudoun County make one of the following responses to your request within the five-day time period:

• We provide you with the records that you have requested in their entirety.
• We withhold all of the records that you have requested, because all of the records are subject to a specific statutory exemption. If all of the records are being withheld, we must send you a response in writing. That writing must identify the volume and subject matter of the records being withheld, and state the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows us to withhold the records.
• We provide some of the records that you have requested, but withhold other records. We cannot withhold an entire record if only a portion of it is subject to an exemption. In that instance, we may redact the portion of the record that may be withheld, and must provide you with the remainder of the record. We must provide you with a written response stating the specific section of the Code of Virginia that allows portions of the requested records to be withheld.
• We inform you in writing that the requested records cannot be found or do not exist (we do not have the records you want). However, if we know that another public body has the requested records, we must include contact information for the other public body in our response to you.
• If it is practically impossible for Loudoun County to respond to your request within the five-day period, we must state this in writing, explaining the conditions that make the response impossible. This will allow us seven additional working days to respond to your request, giving us a total of 12 working days to respond to your request.

Large Number of Records Requests

If you make a request for a very large number of records, and we feel that we cannot provide the records to you within 12 working days without disrupting our other organizational responsibilities, we may petition the court for additional time to respond to your request. However, FOIA requires that we make a reasonable effort to reach an agreement with you concerning the production or the records before we go to court to ask for more time.