In November of 2021, the Illinois Attorney General began investigating the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District for both Open Meetings Act (OMA) and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) violations. After nearly a year of inquiry, the CUPHD has refused to release or cannot account for recordings of 33 meetings of their Board of Health.
Check CU has also been researching CUPHD’s history on compliance with public records laws. In correspondence provided by the Illinois Attorney General (IAG), we discovered that CUPHD FOIA Officer Patricia Robinson made verifiably false statements to the IAG in an effort to evade public records requests.
In email correspondence with IAG Public Access Counselor Sarah Pratt in April 2020, Robinson claimed that the CUPHD was experiencing an increasing number of FOIA requests and that COVID-19 was hampering their ability to supply public records. Robinson further claimed that a specific group had sent a “series of requests”.
In order to fact-check Robinson’s claim, Check CU acquired and reviewed CUPHD’s FOIA requests for 2019, 2020, and 2021.
At the time that Ms. Robinson sent her plea to the PAC on April 13th 2020, CUPHD had only received 27 requests in 2020 (about one every four days). In 2019, the CUPHD had received 42 requests by April 13th. At the time Ms. Robinson emailed the PAC on April 13th, 2020 the CUPHD had received far fewer FOIA requests than in the prior year, and was also receiving a lower number of requests per day than it had over the entirety of 2019. By any measure, CUPHD’s FOIA workload was far lower than usual.
CUPHD’s FOIA workload is also far lower than other public bodies in the area. With an annual budget of about $13 million, and only 85 FOIA requests in 2021, CUPHD’s FOIA workload is only a third of that of the Cities of Urbana and Champaign when normalized to annual budget.
Ms. Robinson’s claim that the CUPHD was overly burdened with FOIA requests appears to be entirely false. Ms. Robinson’s claim that CUPHD was receiving “a series of requests” from any particular group also appears to be false – no person or group had sent greater than two requests.
As a response to CUPHD’s deception, Sarah Pratt wrote that “public bodies that are unable to meet statutory deadlines due to the circumstances surrounding COVID· 19 may determine it is appropriate to set reasonable time periods beyond the statutory deadlines within which to respond to FOIA requests during this time of crisis.”
The statement from PAC Pratt appears to give public bodies very minimal leniency on FOIA response times immediately after the inception of the pandemic, even though the FOIA law never actually changed.
Far more pernicious than the initial deception, Check CU has learned that the CUPHD has continued to cite the same April 2020 Sarah Pratt correspondence nearly two years later. The CUPHD appears to believe that they have indefinite license to ignore and deny FOIA requests.
CUPHD FOIA Officer Robinson invoked Pratt’s letter throughout 2021, even though the CUPHD was receiving far fewer FOIA requests in 2021 than they had in the prior two years. For example, Robinson ignored Check CU’s 2021 request for Board of Health meeting records for months, and nearly a year later, only a portion of the records have been provided.
Correspondence between the Public Access Counselor Sarah Pratt and Champaign-Urbana Public Health District FOIA Officer Patricia Robinson can be seen below (click image for full 2-page PDF):
