The Illinois Open Meetings Act (5 ILCS 120) states
“It is the public policy of this State that public bodies exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business and that the people have a right to be informed as to the conduct of their business. In order that the people shall be informed, the General Assembly finds and declares that the actions of public bodies be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly.”
In addition, the public shall be given advance notice of and the right to attend all meetings at which any business of a public body is discussed or acted upon in any way, with limited exceptions. All meetings shall be held at specified times and places which are convenient and open to the public. The written minutes of all meetings shall include:
- the date, time and place of the meeting;
- the members of the public body recorded as present or absent; and
- a summary of discussion on all matters proposed, deliberated, or decided, and a record of any votes taken.
The minutes shall be approved within 30 days after that meeting or at the next regular meeting, whichever is later. Minutes of the meeting shall be available for public inspection within 10 days after approval, and must be posted on the website of any public body that has a website maintained by full-time staff.
The Kane County Forest Preserve District has not always complied with the spirit or the letter of this law. The meetings may be open to the public, but the times and places are not generally conducive to public attendance. The Executive Committee, for example often meets at 8:30 a.m. on week days, which may be convenient for the commissioners and staff but not the general working public. When the District announced the public information meeting last year on the proposed plan for Brunner Forest Preserve, they scheduled it for Wednesday, April 11, 2012, between the hours of 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. at their headquarters in Geneva – more than 20 miles from Brunner Forest Preserve and the local people most interested in the plan, during rush hour on a week day. The timing seemed to indicate more interest in meeting a requirement for public input than in actually receiving any.
Meeting minutes do not always include a summary of all matters proposed, deliberated, or decided. As noted earlier, the November 7, 2008 minutes of the Executive Committee stated that
“Staff is also looking at mining the gravel on the (Brunner) property; they will present a report in the coming months.”
A FOIA request for that report along with supporting materials was answered:
“No such report was ever commissioned or written; . . .no such report was created, so none can be supplied to you.”
Were the minutes incorrect, or was a legitimate request for public information denied? Another example is the approval of the $2 million contribution to the City of Aurora for the River Edge Park. Both the Executive Committee minutes of 2-5-10 and the Full Commission minutes of 2-9-10 record the approval this large expenditure with no discussion and no dissent noted. If, indeed, the minutes are accurate and this expenditure was approved with no discussion, then the commissioners were not fulfilling their obligations to the residents and taxpayers who elected them. If there was a discussion, it should be reflected in the minutes.
Those members of the public who wish to stay informed about, or participate in, the public business of the Kane County Forest Preserve District have their work cut out for them. Despite the requirement to post the minutes within 10 days of approval, there is sometimes a period of months between the date of the meeting and the date the minutes are available. A search of the District website on 3-29-13 for the most recent minutes revealed the following:
- For the Full Commission, the most recent minutes were for the 1-15-13 meeting, although the calendar showed that they were scheduled to meet on 2-13 and 3-12;
- For the Executive Committee, the most recent minutes were for the 10-5-12 meeting, almost six months prior, although they were scheduled to meet on 2-1-13 and 3-8-13;
- For the Land Acquisition Committee, the most recent minutes were for 1-18-13, although they were scheduled to meet on 2-28 and 3-15;
- For the Planning and Utilization Committee, the most recent minutes were for 10-25-12, although they were scheduled to meet on 1-18-13, 2-28-13, and 3-15-13; and
- For the Finance Committee, the most recent minutes were for 4-13-12, almost a year earlier, although they were scheduled to meet on 1-29-13.
It is difficult to imagine that there was no business requiring the action of some of those committees for months at a time, or why there were no minutes posted after scheduled meetings. One way to mitigate the lengthy delays between meetings and the posting of minutes would be to post the draft minutes after each meeting, before approval at the next meeting, as the DuPage County Forest Preserve District does. While the Open Meetings Act requires the posting of minutes within 10 days of their approval at the next meeting, that means more than a month’s delay at minimum. When committees meet infrequently or irregularly, as the Finance Committee does, the public is denied access to information that they are entitled to have in a timely fashion. For all practical purposes, information delayed is information denied. Without public access, there is no opportunity for public input or public action.
The lack of access to minutes and information has even troubled Forest Preserve commissioners at times. When the Fabyan Property Utilization Task Force (Subcommittee) was created, Jim Mitchell, the chairman of the Forest Preserve Planning and Utilization Committee, was not one of those appointed by Kane County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay, which seemed odd. Odder still, he complained that board members had not been kept up to date on the work of various task forces as much as he’d like. On 2-15-12, the Daily Herald reported,
“Board members noted none of the meeting minutes from the special committee formed to discuss the future of the old jail/Fabyan Parkway site have been shared or are online for board members or the public to review. The proposed contract (to hire an outside consultant, the Lannert Group) did not go through the county board committee process before coming to the full county board for a vote.”
The $59,000 contract was approved in a split vote, with five commissioners voting against it. Several months later, the lack of information remained an issue. In a 5-4-12 Daily Herald article, Mitchell said,
“With the Settler’s Hill thing, there’s no minutes anywhere that I can find. So you don’t know what those people discussed. This proposal is an attempt to make sure there are minutes so the whole board can know what’s going on and that we have input into that task force so it’s not set up to usurp any of our committee structure.”
If board members have trouble getting information, what chance does the public have?
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was intended to
“enable the people to fulfill their duties of discussing public issues fully and freely, making informed political judgments and monitoring government to ensure it is being conducted in the public interest.” (5 ILCS 140/1)
When Kane County area League of Women Voters participated in a joint project in 2009 to assess how well Freedom of Information or “Sunshine” laws were being followed by local units of government, they gave Kane County and the Kane County Forest Preserve District mixed reviews. Requests for information submitted as part of “The Citizen Initiative for Transparency: Public Document Audit” received replies that were incomplete or questionable as to their accuracy. Since then, there has been some improvement and more information is available on their websites, which reduces the need for FOIA requests. Kane County’s website was given an A- rating in 2012 by the Sunshine Review organization. Kane County Forest Preserve District has not been rated.
But as noted in this study, FOIA requests are not as user friendly as they might be and have not always produced results. In 2011, a search of the Forest Preserve website for “FOIA” came up with no result. The FOIA request form can be found under “Publications,” but still cannot be filled out online; it had to be printed out and mailed in. The requested staff report on mining for gravel in the Brunner Forest Preserve, mentioned in the minutes, did not exist(?) and was not provided. The FOIA request for all long-term leases and IGA’s was incomplete, in many cases lacking the maps, exhibits, or adequate descriptions necessary to identify the exact location and acreage of subject parcels. Still, the FOIA response time did improve, and the results of the 2013 FOIA request were transmitted online, even though the request could not be.
Beyond compliance with the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act laws, there needs to be recognition of and respect for the public’s right to know; a realization “that public bodies exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business and that the people have a right to be informed as to the conduct of their business.” In the summer of 2010, two letters were sent to President John Hoscheit and Executive Director Monica Meyers telling them of the formation of this study group, and asking for information to assist us in conducting a balanced study. They did not reply. Study Chairman Carol Grom also spoke briefly to the Full Commission in August and invited President Hoscheit to address the study group at a future meeting, but still did not receive a reply or any information. So the study was conducted using publicly available information, newspaper articles, meeting minutes on the KCFPD website, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The lack of courtesy shown set an unnecessarily adversarial tone. And as the facts emerged, the level of public concern and distrust increased in direct proportion to the Forest Preserve District’s perceived reluctance to acknowledge the story and explain their actions.
When the first phase of this study, the Study of Potential Gravel Mining in Brunner Forest Preserve, was released in May 2012, letters and CD’s containing the complete text of the study and appendix of supporting materials were mailed to each of the Forest Preserve District commissioners. The only commissioner to respond directly was T. R. Smith, who said he appreciated the effort involved and that he learned a great deal from the report. President John Hoscheit did not respond to the LWV, but objected to the findings of the study at the May 4, 2012 Executive Committee meeting, and in comments to reporters covering the story, as a “mischaracterization of facts.” In a Daily Herald article published the same day, he said,
“The gravel mining discussion was about the benefits of creating a large lake that could be used for active and passive recreation and, from an economic perspective, we could derive revenue from the mining that could be used for that recreational purpose. That discussion was perceived as a potential win-win for the district if we could get the lake and additional money to acquire more preserves. (But) the board has said it’s not going to do that.”
“Discussion of the gravel pit is a moot point. The issue is dormant. This continued paranoia about the gravel mining moving forward is just that.”
But what bothered him the most was “the idea that the district isn’t transparent.” It should. We hope this study is helpful in tracing the origin of that idea.