Illinois takes a giant step back into Dark Ages

Apparently command of the English language, and basic knowledge of words and common sense, are not required to serve in the Illinois General Assembly.

A majority of state representatives and senators don't know the difference between the words “personal” and “personnel.”

So to review:

Personal information includes things like: boxers or briefs, your measurements, Social Security numbers.

Personnel information would be: letters of praise or criticism, discipline issues, whether you're doing your job.

Personal and personnel are not interchangeable, any more than an IBM and an Apple, there, their and they're, or dems and dos.

But don't try convincing the majority of the state general assembly that has now voted to prevent you and me from being able to look at the key personnel records of government employees to determine if they're doing what we pay them to do.

Personnel records of public employees.

As in supervisor evaluations and performance reviews.

We can no longer see them.

From now on, a change to the Illinois “Freedom” of Information Law prevents citizens and the news media from examining personnel records that would inform us whether a government employee has been pressured to do work that is against the law.

State house and senate votes the past month have exempted the performance evaluations of any and all state employees from public disclosure. So there is no legally-mandated mechanism for finding out if: clerks in the office of an elected official are being pressured to do political work; why the brother-in-law of a department head was paid overtime while co-workers were laid off, etc.

Most infuriating is that the widely-heralded changes in the Illinois “Freedom” of Information Act, which allowed access to key personnel records, just took effect 11 months ago.

Veteran Chicago radio reporter Bob Roberts, chairman of the Illinois News Broadcaster Association noted, “It's been less than a year, and already legislators have punched a big hole in attempts to achieve transparency in Illinois government.”

Initially, Gov. Pat Quinn wanted to revise the FOIA law to exempt personnel review records of only law enforcement officers. The argument was that police officers, while public employees, were entitled to a measure of privacy for their own safety and security.

But when Quinn drew down the shade on transparency just a few inches, the General Assembly kept pulling.

Majorities in both houses were convinced that keeping performance evaluations private would encourage more openness and honesty from supervisors.

The question is: What good is openness and honesty about a public employee's conduct and performance if it begins and ends in a file folder?

We pay for these tens of thousands of government workers. Most of them probably do fairly good work. We deserve to know the ones who do not and demand that they be rebuked, replaced and maybe prosecuted.

The Senate vote that cleared the way for Illinois' plunge back into the Dark Ages, followed intense lobby by teachers and public employees unions. Labor leaders convinced (conned?) legislators that the personal data of government employees was at risk, which wasn't true.

The sponsor of the step backward, Sen. Kimberly Lightford, a Maywood Democrat, said, “I believe in open government and I believe in public awareness of salaries, but I think performance evaluations should remain private.”

Of course she does. Lightford's campaign treasury is also chock-full of donations from the unions that represent teachers and other public employees – the groups that want to keep personnel records secret.

Campaign disclosure records, which thankfully are still public, show that half of all the money Lightford accepted in the last reporting year was from government workers' unions and lobbyists.

The most ludicrous explanation came from Sen. Edward Maloney, a Chicago Democrat who said that havoc would rule if parents had access to public schoolteacher evaluations. Maloney said that parents would then try to get their kids in the best schools with the best-performing teachers!

Gee, do you think so?

Just as Lightford has made it a habit, Maloney also counts on teachers and public employee unions for the largest single chunk of his campaign funding, accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years.

The sponsor in the Illinois House has a similar allegiance to the government workers unions that lobbied so hard to keep personnel records locked up.

Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia, an Aurora Democrat who ran unopposed for re-election last month, takes as much money from organized labor as from all other campaign donors combined.

The Illinois Federal of Teachers website proclaims the victory resulted from a “combination of members' calls and e-mails to legislators and the lobbying of IFT and coalition groups.”

Not all state legislators drank the Kool-Aid and went against openness and honesty.

Three senators were on the side of candor and integrity: Republicans Dan Duffy of Lake Barrington, Matt Murphy of Palatine and Kyle McCarter of downstate Lebanon.

“They're still public employees,” said Murphy. “I think people have a right to know.”

We did have that right. For 11 months.

Not anymore.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie