Island Lake releases board meeting summaries

After complaints from some trustees and local residents and inquiries from the Daily Herald, summaries of Island Lake village board meetings from recent months were added to the town's Web site Tuesday.

Four new sets of minutes, as the summaries are known, were posted at villageofislandlake.com. They cover meetings from January, December and September.

Until Tuesday, the most recent meeting summary available on the site was from July 2009. Minutes from several meetings still are missing.

Trustee Laurie Rabattini, who's campaigned for more transparency in the village government, was pleased some of the missing minutes finally are public.

"It's well overdue," she said. "Residents have been talking about it at meetings for quite some time."

The Illinois Open Meetings Act requires every public body to record minutes of meetings. Any government agencies that have Web sites maintained by full-time employees legally must post meeting minutes online within seven days of the approval of the documents, the law states.

Island Lake's meeting minutes are drafted by the village clerk and approved by the full board, which is typical.

Village Clerk Pam Miller said she didn't know who's responsible for posting the minutes online, however.

"I don't have anything to do with putting things on the Web site," she said.

The Daily Herald asked Miller, Mayor Debbie Herrmann and the village's attorney, Scott Puma, about the missing minutes in e-mails Tuesday but did not receive immediate answers. Within hours, however, the four documents were online.

Village Finance Director John Little said the timing was coincidental. An information technology specialist already was scheduled to put the new batch of minutes online Tuesday, Little said.

They were published so late, Little said, because the documents weren't being sent where they needed to go.

Meeting minutes will be posted more regularly now, Little said.