On October 5th, within an Urbana City Council discussion about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin attempted to parade the “enormous expenditure of resources” that the City incurs in fulfilling FOIA requests. She did so by claiming that the City had to print fourteen hundred pages of emails for a single request.
A one and a half minute clip of the meeting video can be seen here:
Marlin: “It ended up being about fourteen hundred pages printed, and the requester requested paper copies. So it’s an enormous expenditure of resources – fourteen hundred pages printed.”
However, Check CU is in possession of emails which show that the City never printed a single page. Kate Levy, Executive Assistant to the Mayor, provided the documents via Dropbox.
The original FOIA request was sent by reporter Chris Carter of WAND-TV in Decatur. Levy initially assessed $162.25 in fees, which is actually much lower than what the City had been charging Urbana residents for much smaller FOIA requests. Carter requested a full fee waiver, which the City granted, and then the records were provided via Dropbox on October 13th.
Curiously, City staff have informed other FOIA requesters, both before and after October 13th, that Dropbox was not an option, and that they had to pay for USB thumb drives in addition to heavy data fees. This policy has led to some Urbana residents being charged over $700 for a single small request, and anyone who could not afford the fees had their requests fully denied.
These details carry a great deal of irony since Diane Marlin’s role in the FOIA discussion on October 5th was to argue that the City should be pursuing fees for burdensome FOIA requests. In citing the fourteen hundred page FOIA request, which she considered to be extremely burdensome, Marlin was also citing a request where the City very readily waived all fees for a corporation in Decatur. Apparently, Marlin only wants to see the heavy-handed FOIA fees applied to Urbana residents.
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana