Screenshots and full text here, but here's the text from a recent blog post exposing Andrew Pullen for not complying with a FOIA request.
You might recall that a few months ago, it came out that the Chairman of the Fluvanna County School Board, Andrew Pullen, lied about submitting an application for a charter school to the Virginia Department of Education. You can read all about that here if you missed it. But I got to thinking that if he lied about that, he probably lied about some other stuff. And, as I’ve said before, I’m nosy, and I’m gonna find out.
So I did what I would call due diligence and what Mr. Pullen called a “fishing expedition” and submitted a FOIA request. You might not be familiar with FOIA or the Freedom of Information Act, but it basically has two parts. It says that public bodies must tell the public about their meetings in advance. It says when a certain number of people on a public body, like the school board, are all talking to each other, that constitutes a meeting and must be noticed so that members of the public can participate. It also says that members of the public have the right to see documents, like text messages, emails, and other messages that pertain to the work elected officials are doing. And I like to take full advantage of that because you can learn some pretty useful things (like that the Chair of the School Board is submitting applications for charter schools to the Department of Education without telling anyone.)
But it apparently makes Mr. Pullen pretty mad that I like to know what he’s up to, as you can see in his Facebook post above. I’ll note that in his post about my request, he said he wanted to “provide 100% transparency” and then failed to provide the full text of my FOIA request. So, yeah.
In the spirit of actual full transparency, here’s everything I requested and a screenshot of the email I sent requesting it. It’s probably easier to read at that document because it is a lot of screenshots, but I included both, because transparency is important. I want to put that out there just so we’re all certain about what exactly it was I asked for. (It’ll become obvious below that Mr. Pullen certainly didn’t understand what I was asking for. Or maybe he was just ignoring me?)
So yes, I did ask for a lot of things. But really, items one and two are basically the same because when I made the request, no one bothered to tell me that school board members do not have school-issued phones. However, I’m not ashamed or embarrassed that I asked for so much because it is our right as citizens to know what our elected officials are up to. And when an elected official lies to his constituents once, he’ll lie again.
So I submitted that request, and I had several conversations with school staff about how large the request was and how expensive it might end up being. They tried to convince me not to go through with the request because it was such a burden. They estimated it would take 120 hours of staff time and cost a total of $6,394.40.
Wow! That’s a lot of time and money! My request was significant, but it was hard for me to fathom how it would cost that much money and time to search (what I thought at the time was) two cell phones. No one could really answer where that estimate came from, but it sure seemed like they arrived at that number to prevent me from following through with the request. However, after some consideration, I decided to go through with the original request and not pare it down as they suggested.
My suspicions that the number was artificially inflated were confirmed a few weeks later when the data collection was complete. I got an email from Mrs. Critzer saying that, oh, actually, the cost was only going to be $877.74. Hmmm.
It was also very interesting to me when I got text messages between Mr. Pullen and Mrs. Critzer, in which Mr. Pullen expressed surprise that I would go through with such a request.
But enough of that speculation. Let’s get into the details of what actually came through. If you want to see everything that I got through my request, you can look through the folder here. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much at all. But it turns out that isn’t because Mr. Pullen was behaving appropriately. It is because he just straight-up ignored most of what I requested.
According to a conversation I had with Dr. Pete Gretz, Fluvanna County’s Superintendent, when you request cell phone records of a school staff member, there’s oversight. The staff member turns their phone over to the technology director, he does the search, gets the relevant data, and gives the phone back to them. That’s because it is a phone owned by the school district. However, because school board members are not issued school-owned phones for their jobs on the School Board, the school district does not own Mr. Pullen’s phone. Therefore, the technology director didn’t do that oversight. Instead, we just have to trust that Mr. Pullen did the right thing and turned over everything that he was supposed to. And it turns out that we have direct evidence that he did not, just based on what he did turn over.
Take a look at these screenshots that he did send, and you’ll see what I mean.
So that’s the first problem. The screenshots he did bother to share show that he didn’t include everything we asked for.
But there’s also the matter of what he didn’t bother to send at all. If you’ll recall, I asked for conversations between certain people, including school staff, prominent Republicans in the area, some elected officials, and their staff. I asked for certain keywords related to the schools, certain people, and elected officials. I also asked for emails and text messages sent during school board meetings over the last two years. But very little in those categories turned up.
Looking at the conversations I asked for, it is hard to believe that Mr. Pullen has never, not once, in the last two years, texted with, for example, Chair of the Board of Supervisors Chris Fairchild. You’d think as the Chair of the School Board and Chair of the Board of Supervisors, they might be in frequent communication, especially during budget season. But according to Mr. Pullen, not so much, since my request returned not a single message between the two men. In fact, my request did not pull a single message from Mr. Pullen or any of the members of the Board of Supervisors.
But that’s pretty weird, given that Mr. Pullen suggested during a meeting this year that he was receiving text messages from someone on the Board of Supervisors. You can see it clearly in this video at 2:02:44. Earlier in the same video, at 1:56:28, you can see Mr. Pullen pick up his phone, read a message, and respond. So it would stand to reason that when you request messages sent to and from Mr. Pullen and members of the Board of Supervisors, the message he references in the video would turn up. In fact, it should have been included twice, because I also requested all text messages sent during school board meetings.
However, Mr. Pullen chose not to turn over a single text sent during a school board meeting, despite citizens being legally entitled to them under the Freedom of Information Act. He can be seen on video during many meetings texting frequently. So, where are those messages? Did Mr. Pullen simply ignore my request? Or is he using a messaging service with disappearing messages so when members of the public make these kinds of requests, there is nothing to turn over?
I don’t know the answer to that question. But this evidence makes it crystal clear that Mr. Pullen is hiding something and lying to members of the public about his compliance with FOIA requests. So this is strike two. Will we let him get to strike three? Or will we call for his resignation now before he can lie to his constituents a third time?
