Last week Mayor Daley and Mara Georges, the city’s corporation counsel, announced at a press conference that the city was adding several new features to its Web site to improve the “transparency” of Chicago government. “That’s the kind of government the residents of Chicago want, and it’s the kind of government that I want,” Daley said.
Georges and Daley told reporters that posting the FOIA information online was a response to mandates of the state’s newly toughened FOIA law that went into effect at the beginning of the year. (And which some legislators from around the state have been trying to roll back ever since.) The amended law does require government agencies to keep track of all the FOIA requests they get, but it doesn’t require them to reveal to the public that the requests have been made. And most important, it doesn’t require them to let the public know how they’ve responded to the requests.
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Last September President Obama announced that as part of his administration’s commitment to open government he was authorizing the publication of a White House visitors’ log. “Americans have a right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process,” he said at the time.
Such was the case with my FOIA for Daley’s appointment calendar. I had to do a lot of badgering, but eventually—after about six weeks—the law department provided me with a stack of papers detailing whom the mayor had met with and where he’d gone every working day in January. The contact information for various staffers and specifics about security arrangements had been blacked out, which was fair enough, since these details are exempt under the FOIA.
On May 4 I sent an e-mail asking for help in getting the additional records. I emphasized that if there were any way of getting the information without making a formal FOIA request I’d be open to it. I didn’t hear anything back, so a few days later—on May 6—I followed up with a call. I was told that they had indeed received my e-mail. “We’re treating it as a FOIA request,” the spokeswoman said. “You’ll be hearing from us shortly.”
I keep checking, but so far they haven’t posted this response on the FOIA page.
