At the start of the pandemic, Americans willingly gave up some of their rights to serve the greater good, only to quickly have cause to wonder when – or even if – they’d be getting them back from bureaucrats and elected officials, at all levels, suddenly drunk with power.
It’s been good to see that, late to the party though sometimes they may be, those who wear judicial robes for a living are, as often as not, pushing back against COVID-spawned government overreach when cases come before them.
And one of the latest examples is quite close to home.
Virginians benefited last month from a state Supreme Court ruling, taking the Fairfax County government to task for overstepping its authority during the depths of the COVID pandemic in enacting a significant rewrite to its zoning law.
The court ruled that, despite what the county’s attorneys and a Circuit Court judge opined, the locality did not have the power circumvent the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (guaranteeing the public the right to comment on issues under consideration), unless the matter truly was connected to addressing the health emergency. A zoning rewrite, no matter how major, did not qualify.
Fairfax officials had inferred that they possessed the authority, citing language in a budget package adopted by the General Assembly in early 2020. Oh no, said the Supreme Court, you didn’t gain the authority to operate the way you did (holding public participation in a “virtual” setting) until the General Assembly explicitly gave it to you, more than a year later.
The high court’s ruling does not suggest that Fairfax officials were trying anything nefarious, rather that they were relying on an interpretation of the law the justices did not agree with. And the justices do get the final say, after all.
And so, Fairfax officials likely will have to go back and re-do the approval process for the “zMOD” zoning rewrite. It’ll be an annoyance for them and some in the public (and press), but we’ll all live.
Far more importantly, Fairfax leaders, and local-government officials across the commonwealth, are now on notice to be extra-careful not to trample on the rights of the public.
We raise our glass and tip our hat to that.
