Illinois: Making Government Records As Public As They Should Be

The recent and long time awaited for new Illinois Freedom of Information Act (Senate Bill 189), passed by the state's Senate now awaits being signed into law by the Governor. If signed, the new law will take effect starting 1 January 2010, hopefully radically changing the situation with the current state of government records openness for public inspection that is regarded by vast number of the state's residents as unsatisfactory.

The issues has a really long history, and Illinois seems to have been the most reluctant state regarding the development of its own legal regulations governing the access to the public records held by the state's repositories. Just consider the fact that Illinois was the last of the US states to enact its own FOIA as late as in 1983, 17 years after the federal Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by the US President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 4, 1966.

Since its adoption in 1988 the Illinois FOIA law received much criticism from the behalf of citizens and public rights advocacy organizations for being too easy to manipulate, especially with no penalty risk for the officials due to the absence of any penalty provision. The year 1999 action by group of the Illinois journalists confirmed those concerns did have valid grounds. A large group of journalists then engaged in a statewide campaign simultaneously requesting public records from county governments in all 102 counties across the sate of Illinois. From all requests for viewing public records made by journalists statewide, nearly 70% of the requesters were told to come later, while 25% of the government units just refused to release the public records under different pretexts.

Since then several public activist groups kept campaigning to amend the existing FOIA fighting to force the governments change the way they handle the requests for public records. Their efforts had been largely in vain, though, until the Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan started backing the action several years ago.

Now the community believes that after the Senate voted for the new law, there will be no opposition from behalf of the Governor Patt Quinn and the new FOIA will be signed by him. If the law is enacted, it will be mandated that every government outlet across the state designates a special official responsible for freedom of information related issues as seen by the new law. All of those officers are to undergo proper training at the attorney general's office.

With new law coming in effect the government bodies will be obligated to respond requests within five days since the request was filed. But the most important change about the new Freedom of Information Act is that it provides for introduction of a public access counselor position in the attorney general's office along with definition of the wide range of power of that official needed to help citizens in government public records access with the authority of issuing binding opinion and even bringing case to court. Unfortunately, the clause providing for criminal punishment for non-compliance with the new law by government officials and employees was removed from the law in the process of hearing.