CHICAGO, Ill. (WAND)- Many government bodies in Illinois ignore public records request, and some improperly deny public records most of the time, according to a report released by the Better Government Association Thursday.
The report is based on records of rulings by the state’s Public Access Counselor between April 2010 and March 2018.
“The information that we received from the PAC office did have some limitations in that it is only a subset of the actual number of FOIA requests that are sent to the PAC office for review,” said civic engagement and research analyst Annum Haider. “They’re even a smaller subset of the FOIA requests sent to the public bodies over the years.”
Although the state’s Freedom of Information Act requires public bodies respond to public record requests within specific deadlines, the report found some bodies failed to respond to hundreds of requests. Researchers found Chicago Police failed to respond to 672 requests, Illinois Department of Corrections failed to respond to 519 and State Police failed to respond to 200.
“These are agencies that are charged with enforcing the law, and they’re the ones failing to follow the law that applies to them,” Haider said.
Researchers also found that some bodies wrongly applied exemptions to FOIA. The University of Illinois, for example, wrongly used exemptions to deny records requests 63 percent of the time in the cases reviewed.
At his inauguration Monday, Attorney General Kwame Raoul pledged to strengthen the Public Access Counselor.
“I will do my part to let in the sunshine by adequately resourcing the public access counselor and make the office work proactively to create transparency in government,” Raoul said.
