On Monday October 5th, I wrote a letter to the Urbana City Council predicting that City Attorney James Simon would lie to them and the public about how the city legal department has been charging fees on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Here is that letter and attachment:
2020-10-02 City of Urbana July 27 2020 FOIA Fees Document (2020-F-540)
Here is the portion of Curt Borman’s memo to the Council that revealed their plan to lie about recurrent requester fees. Borman intends to pretend that the excessive fees which were deemed illegal by the Illinois Attorney General simply because of an error in wording:
At the October 5th Urbana City Council Meeting, James Simon lied in exactly the way I’d predicted. He claimed that recurrent requesters were only being charged if their request also met the definition of “voluminous” (over 500 pages):
As mentioned in my letter, this doesn’t make any sense because Simon himself gave a presentation on July 20th wherein he put forth the illegal practice of automatically charging recurrent requesters voluminous request fees. Assistant City Attorney Curt Borman posted multiple notices to the City website indicating the same. Mayor Diane Marlin also said, multiple times, that she wanted to charge recurrent requesters higher (illegal) fees:
James Simon and Curt Borman now mean to lie and back-pedal, claiming that no one was charged unless their request met the legal definition of voluminous. This is especially embarrassing, given that they have issued fees on numerous requests not meeting the 500 page “voluminous” threshold.
My own request labeled 2020-F-386 is a good example. The request wasn’t even close to 500 pages and the Illinois Attorney General ruled the fees to be illegal (article here).
Below is another FOIA response that someone forwarded to me. Lizabeth Kay Meharry wanted $20 for 1.85 megabytes of data – for a typical PDF, that’s about 33 pages. It is also easily emailed, but Meharry wants $8 for a flash drive too.
Simon and Borman clearly aren’t going to grow a sense of morality any time soon, but at least their deceit is becoming more publicly known. Aldermen Bill Brown, Jared Miller, and Maryalice Wu seemed frustrated with Simon and Borman at the October 5th meeting, when the duo struggled to patch together lies in front of a very unimpressed Council:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that any of the Urbana City Council members are going to speak up or take action on the issue of Urbana’s unscrupulous legal department. Every Council member, with the exception of Jared Miller, seems keen on following as their legal team leads the City into ever more embarrassing and unethical quandaries.
Christopher Hansen, Urbana