CHICAGO, IL — It was the kind of legislative move that’s meant to fly under the radar.
Just days before Thanksgiving, state House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie attached an amendment to an obscure bill to tinker with the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The measure was designed to narrow the definition of what’s considered a public record and make it harder to recover legal fees when state officials illegally withhold information.
Currie’s move was intended to set the stage for the measure’s quick passage this week, after state lawmakers returned to the Capitol for the final days of the fall veto session.
But it was not to be. A watchdog group, the Better Government Association, and other transparency advocates took note when the amendment appeared online. “We had no advance notice—total surprise,” said Judy Stevens, policy coordinator for the BGA. The group issued an action alert on Nov. 28, one day after the holiday.
By Monday, the backlash against the measure was coming fast and furious. An impromptu coalition of transparency advocacy groups—the BGA, the ACLU of Illinois, the Citizen Advocacy Center, the Illinois Broadcasters Association, the Illinois Press Association, and the Illinois Public Interest Research Group—voiced fierce opposition.
Even the Illinois Attorney General’s Office joined in the fray. “It would severely hamper efforts to increase transparency in Illinois—which is an ongoing priority for our office and for many folks in Illinois,” Natalie Bauer, a spokeswoman for the office, told Amanda Vinicky of Illinois Public Radio. “As we all know, more transparency is desperately needed in the state government.”
And a slew of newspaper editorials followed—all denouncing the measure as the lawmakers’ attempt to “dismantle,” “dilute,” “chip away,” “assault,” and “attack” the FOIA law. “The more lawmakers tinker with your right to know, the more likely it is that Illinois will revert to the Stone Age when it comes to information its residents deserve,” the Rockford Register Star declared.
The measure went before a House committee on Monday, but Currie didn’t call it up for a vote—in light of the “firestorm” of opposition, Currie told Vinicky. At least for now, it’s “gone, buried, dead,” Currie told me. The House adjourned for the year on Wednesday, ahead of schedule.
All this legislative drama unfolded on the heels of a separate fight over the so-called “FOIA tax” bill, which sponsors say is meant to discourage “voluminous” FOIA requests by allowing fees of up to $100 each.
Transparency advocates and news organizations weren’t fond of that one, either. The bill “apparently is supposed to target the serial FOIA requesters that governmental bodies continue to complain about,” The State Journal-Register wrote. “But it does not warrant an overall weakening of state sunshine law and the charging of exorbitant fees for public information that taxpayers already cover.”
When the FOIA-fee bill was rushed through the legislature in the spring, it was vetoed by Gov. Pat Quinn. Two weeks ago, however, the House moved to override Quinn’s veto, and the Senate did the same last night, putting the measure officially on the books.
What’s prompted the effort to change the state’s open-records laws? Currie said she was pushing the amendment at the behest of Senate President John J. Cullerton. Senate Democratic staffers who worked on the last FOIA update in 2009 weren’t happy with the law on a number of fronts, she explained.
They “were of the view that—because of court cases, and this, that, and whatever—the Act had moved in the directions that they did not think were in concert with the original meaning of its language,” she said. “But I think that idea is disputed by others who worked on the proposal in 2009.”
It was also Cullerton who requested that the bill not be called for a vote at the committee hearing, Currie said, “and I didn’t hear back from him about trying to resuscitate it later on.” Cullerton did not return a call from CJR.
But while the measure was pulled in the face of opposition this week, the fight may not be over. Said Currie: “We’ll start up the discussion in the next session in January.”
Rui Kaneya is CJR’s correspondent for Illinois and Indiana. A former investigations editor at The Chicago Reporter, Kaneya was a recipient of the Investigative Reporters and Editors Minority Fellowship and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Minority Fellowship in Urban Journalism. He has received numerous journalism awards, among them the Watchdog Award for Excellence in Public Interest Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute to Excellence National Media Award. Follow him on Twitter @ruikaneya.