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In this week’s edition of the Reader, Ben Joravsky and I report on how little evidence the city can come up with to show that it was monitoring the terms of its $10 million subsidy deal with Republic Windows and Doors from 1996 to 2006. Specifically, we sent in a Freedom of Information Act request asking the city for “copies of all reports, audits, and other documentation produced by city of Chicago officials from monitoring compliance” of the agreement with Republic. What we got back was a mere five pages–“certificates” of staffing levels reported by the company for just half the years of the agreement.
Then, as we wrote in the story, “We called the community development department and asked why Republic hadn’t prepared job certificates every year, whether the city had done anything about it, whether city officials had visited the factory and checked the reported job data, and why had taken so long to round up the materials for us…. We were told it would take a few days to get answers. We’re still waiting.”
And why had it taken three weeks–twice what’s allowed under the FOIA–for the department to respond to our request? “Due to the department mergers (housing and planning) and staff turnover and departure, it took some time to identify the current staff that would be able to locate the files,” Sullivan wrote.
