On July 28th of 2022, Check CU sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the City of Evanston, Illinois seeking records related to a sexual misconduct scandal within their Parks and Recreation Department.
Less than eight hours later, an unidentified Evanston staff member said that they would refuse to respond to the request unless it was narrowed, but no other details were provided.
An email from the unnamed Evanston staff member read, “The extraordinary volume of documents (estimated to be over unknown amount pages and estimated unknown amount of staff hours and multiple staff members to fill the request is too burdensome on City resources to produce the request as drafted.”
For a public body to cite this type of exemption, they have to prove that the burden of producing the records outweighs the public interest in the records.
It was clear that Evanston was both refusing to perform a search and unlawfully denying the records. The City’s FOIA Officer(s) (Stephanie Mendoza, Saúl Rodriguez, Omar Sheikh, Alexandra Ruggie, and Sarah Jones) also violated the FOIA by failing to provide the name of the person who was responsible for the denial (explicitly required in the FOIA).
In September of 2022, Check CU filed a FOIA lawsuit against the City of Evanston in regards to a different FOIA request, wherein the City unlawfully denied access to police misconduct records. Evanston has essentially admitted guilt in that case, and we expect a settlement agreement soon.
On March 7th, 2023, Check CU requested the Parks and Recreation Department sexual misconduct records again, using identical wording to the prior attempt. This time, Evanston Deputy City Clerk Saúl Rodriguez produced about six hundred pages in records, which are provided below. The bulk of the pages are contained within a 379 page report, none of which required any review or redaction by City staff.
One of the PDF files from Rodriquez was about 180 megabytes in size, but Check CU was able to compress it down to about 20 megabytes while retaining all features and legibility, so we are not sure how or why Evanston made it so bloated.
We believe Evanston public officials (namely the primary FOIA Officer, City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza) willfully and knowingly violated public records laws the first time we asked for the records. There never existed any undue burden on the City that would have inhibited them from providing the records, or which outweighed the public interest. We believe that after learning via lawsuit that they cannot simply discard the public records laws at their pleasure, they complied with the second attempt.
Evanston, Illinois Lakefront Sexual Misconduct Allegations FOIA Records Supplied on March 22, 2023
Evanston, Illinois Memorandum on Sexual Harassment Concerns on the Lakefront (July 15, 2021)