The Urbana, Illinois City Council shows no signs of changing their well-established practice of ignoring residents’ reports of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) violations by City staff.
At tonight’s City Council meeting, University of Illinois PhD graduate and Urbana resident Tracy Chong spoke during public input about her own FOIA experience with the City. Ms. Chong was wrongfully declared a “recurrent requester” by City Clerk Charlie Smyth in April of 2020, and her FOIA requests were unlawfully delayed, denied, and charged excess fees for a least a year after that.
City Clerk Charlie Smyth, Assistant City Attorney and FOIA Officer Curt Borman, and current FOIA Officer Ross McNeil were all complicit in the unlawful records handling. Check CU described the scheme deployed against Ms. Chong in an article earlier this year:
How Urbana Officials Abused One FOIA Requester for a Year
The Urbana City Council has been made aware of this situation numerous times within the past year (Check CU has also contacted the Council members several times), but no City Council member or City official has so much as uttered an acknowledgement.
Tonight was no different – Ms. Chong did not get any response from the Council. She said that no one from the City has attempted to contact her or issue an explanation for the unlawful scheme used to obstruct her access to public records. Ms. Chong hasn’t even received a response from her own Alderman, Christopher Evans, even though he campaigned on transparency and open records.
In January 2021, Ms. Chong started a small news site (CU Perspective), but she said that having her FOIA requests delayed for months, and often still denied after the long delay, made it extremely difficult to do research.
“It is very disappointing to see that our elected officials seem to condone this conduct. It is so disheartening that this issue was never acknowledged, and that when I spoke about it tonight I was met with blank faces from the Council.”
Urbana has unlawfully used the “recurrent requester” designation against several requesters in the past couple of years in an effort to delay and deny records, as well as charge thousands of dollars of unlawful FOIA fees. The extent of the abuse is not fully known, since Urbana has already refused to release records showing how often they’ve deployed the “recurrent” designation and how many times they have charged illegal fees.
It is known that FOIA Officer Ross McNeil, appointed by the City Council on February 8th, 2021, continues to use the same types of schemes on a regular basis today. Any attempts that Check CU has made to make the Urbana City Council aware of these and other FOIA violations have also been ignored.
One point of clarification: Alderperson Grace Wilken, Ward 6 did address Ms. Chong’s concerns about remote public input being allowed for in-person council meetings. Alderperson Wilken spoke at length about the need for council to clarify why Urbana is not allowing remote public input and that the OMA excuse is unacceptable. Wilken has insisted we give the public a better answer.