Many public bodies, likely the large majority in the CU area, post videos of their meetings on the internet for public review.  Records of public meetings, and their ease of access, are critical for good governance.

With the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Champaign Public Health District (CUPHD) became a focus of enormous public interest.  However, Check CU found that none of the CUPHD Board meetings were available for public view.

On March 1^st, 2021, Check CU inquired with CUPHD FOIA Officer Patricia Robinson about recordings of the Board meetings, and on April 11^th, affirmed that inquiry by declaring it as a FOIA request seeking the prior seven years of Board meeting recordings.

Open session public meeting recordings are not subject to any level of exemption or redaction.  Providing the records should be a simple matter of copying the files onto any digital medium. 

FOIA requires a public body to respond to requests within 5 business days, and the public body can extend the time by an additional 5 business days (14 calendar days).  However, after three months, Robinson had not provided a single recording.

In late July, 2021, CUPHD Public Information Officer Amy Roberts finally agreed to provide a small portion of the requested recordings.  Every effort at gaining FOIA compliance having failed, and having already waited four months, a delivery schedule for the remaining records was proposed to Roberts on August 5^th, 2020, to which she agreed.

However, the agreement was broken a week later when the next installment of records was due, but they were not available at the CUPHD building in Champaign.  A plea for Roberts to simply mail the records also failed.

After five months of repeated efforts, CUPHD issued what appeared to be their final installment of the requested meeting recordings, but thirty three recordings were missing.  Despite multiple inquiries, Robertson seemed unwilling or unable to answer for the missing recordings.

As many as sixteen of the missing meetings seem to have taken place during the period in 2020‐2021 when the CUPHD Board was holding virtual meetings.  Either the CUPHD is unwilling to provide these recordings, or they don’t exist.  The Open Meetings Act (OMA), however, compels public bodies to make full verbatim recordings of meetings which take place remotely:

Section 7(e)(9) In addition to the requirements for open meetings under Section 2.06, public bodies holding open meetings under this subsection (e) must also keep a verbatim record of all their meetings in the form of an audio or video recording. Verbatim records made under this paragraph (9) shall be made available to the public under, and are otherwise subject to, the provisions of Section 2.06.

The OMA also requires public bodies to make verbatim recordings of every closed session meeting, whether it takes place remotely or in person.  Check CU did not ask for any closed session recordings, but if the CUPHD Board failed to record their virtual open session meetings, they may have also failed to record their closed sessions.

Having attempted to acquire the records over a period of eight to nine months, and having exhausted all efforts to acquire a complete response or explanation from CUPHD, Check CU submitted a request for review the Illinois Attorney General on November 9^th, 2021.  Appended to the request was 35 pages of email correspondence with CUPHD, and a table of meeting dates showing which recordings were missing. The request also alleged that the CUPHD Board violated the OMA by failing to post their approved meeting minutes for several meetings.

On November 22^nd, 2021, Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Silver initiated an investigation in regards to the alleged FOIA and OMA violations.  A final determination has not yet been issued.  AAG Silver’s initial inquiry letter into the alleged FOIA and OMA violations by CUPHD, labeled 2021 PAC 68452 & 68453, can be viewed below (click for full 3-page PDF):

UPDATE: Check CU has published a new article related to this situation:
CUPHD’s False Claims to Attorney General, Efforts to Deny Records