Freedom of Information Act doesn’t always reveal government malfeasance. In Patrick County, it showed a government looking out for taxpayers.

In late January, Patrick County announced that its hospital, which had been closed for seven years, would not reopen as planned.

A Chicago company, Foresight Health, had bought the property in 2022 but the anticipated reopening had been pushed back several times — and now the county said Foresight wouldn’t be reopening the hospital at all.

This announcement did not come as a surprise — nothing much seemed to be happening at the site — but it was still a shock. Patrick County had really wanted that hospital to reopen, and the county’s state legislator — Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County — had sponsored legislation to make that easier from a licensing point of view. To say that this was a disappointment would be an understatement. It was also a mystery: What had gone wrong?

Three days later, things took a strange turn. Foresight said the deal wasn’t dead, after all, that “nothing is off the table.”

Foresight then followed up with a three-page news release in which the company said it had determined it didn’t have the money to operate the hospital. However, Foresight said it had considered donating the hospital to the county. The county administrator said Foresight had done no such thing.

So which was it?

If only there was a way to find out exactly what Foresight executives and Patrick County officials had said to each other.

Conveniently, there was. We filed a request under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act for all communications between Foresight and the county. When we received those documents, things became a lot clearer.

Part of what was happening here was semantics. As Cardinal health care reporter Emily Schabacker explained in her most recent story, Foresight had offered to “donate” the property — if Patrick County made a “donation” for half the expenses the company had incurred. That doesn’t sound much like a donation; that sounds like a proposed sale. The emails between Foresight and the county further showed that Foresight had pressed the county to wrap up the deal by the end of last year, so it could qualify for a tax deduction. Patrick County was having none of that. In those emails, county administrator Beth Simms made it clear she saw this proposed transaction as a sale — and before the county shelled out any money for the property, it wanted the site studied to see what contamination might exist from decades of medical waste and whatnot. That’s pretty much standard practice before a government buys a potentially questionable site.

We often think of FOIA requests as being used to unearth some shady dealings in government. What that FOIA request turned up here was just the opposite: a portrait of a small, rural county standing up to a Chicago company that was trying to rush it into a quick sale of a property that, by virtue of being a former hospital, could conceivably have environmental issues.

Other documents — not obtained through FOIA but through old-fashioned reporting — also showed just what expenses Foresight had run up, and wanted Patrick County taxpayers to pay for. Those included $457,000 of travel on a private jet and stays at a luxury resort. Between the documents we got through FOIA and those we got through good reporting, it became abundantly clear why Patrick County was not taking up the company’s offer to “donate” the property.

This week is Sunshine Week, a week set aside to celebrate and call attention to open records laws around the country. The most recent example being talked about around the country: In Illinois, a FOIA request showed that the mayor of one small city had used city funds to pay her hair stylist $7,650. Here at Cardinal, we regularly use FOIA requests in our reporting. We’ve never turned up anything as juicy as that taxpayer-subsidized hair stylist, but we suspect Patrick County taxpayers are pleased to know that their county government hasn’t been pressured into buying the property just because there’s a lot of sentiment to reopen that hospital.

The Freedom of Information Act is often thought of as a law that helps journalists, and it certainly does. However, it’s a law for everyone. In Russell County, there’s a proposal for a controversial landfill. Residents opposed to the project have filed FOIA requests that they say went unanswered. We filed the same requests, and got a response — and the 2022 study that the county commissioned on the project. You can read the reporting that Cardinal’s Susan Cameron did on the project, and also the report itself.

Cardinal education reporter Lisa Rowan has also used FOIA to obtain documents that informed her recent report on how Virginia Military Institute’s alumni association has suspended some members who it says misused thousands of email addresses. She’s also used it in some of her coverage of Roanoke County schools.

When Lynchburg’s newly elected city council descended into acrimony last year, we used FOIA to obtain internal emails between council members that showed they were bickering just as much behind the scenes as they were in public, with accusations of “tantrums” and “tyranny” going back and forth. Rachel Mahoney detailed that dysfunction in a story for Cardinal last summer. 

Cardinal’s political reporter Markus Schmidt also used FOIA as he pursued a tip about possible political shenanigans in certain localities — a story that never appeared because the documents he received revealed no shenanigans whatsoever. That’s how journalism works. Sometimes tips don’t pan out. 

Lots of things go into reporting — attending events, asking questions. But the availability of government documents is central to our work and, ultimately, the work of democracy. There’s an old saying: Sunshine is the best disinfectant. That may or may not be true for those dishes in the kitchen sink, but it’s certainly true for government.