Editorial: COD debate highlights the need to strengthen public access laws

It remains for authorities such as the DuPage County state's attorney to decide whether, as government watchdog groups urged last week, College of DuPage board members violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act and if so, whether to take the rare step of prosecuting them for it.

But if the groups produced no other benefit, they drew attention to the continuing need to strengthen Illinois' transparency laws.

It should not be surprising that Adam Andrzejewski led Thursday's news conference demanding action against COD; one of the watchdog groups he manages, For the Good of Illinois, found in March 2014 that 81 percent of agency heads appointed by then-Gov. Pat Quinn failed to comply with a law requiring training and certification in the transparency act - and that six government agencies outright ignored For the Good of Illinois' Freedom of Information Act requests with no consequences.

Moreover, a survey of hundreds of Illinois government bodies conducted jointly by the Illinois Press Association and the Citizens Advocacy Center reported last November that the boards of many local governments "routinely" failed to meet Open Meetings Act requirements. More than a quarter of them failed to post adequate notice, almost half failed to post an agenda as the law requires and more than half failed to post meeting minutes in the time frame the law demands.

The problem, the CAC stressed, is that no good enforcement mechanism exists to punish agencies that spurn the law. It called for the legislature to strengthen Illinois' law on those counts. Perhaps one place to begin, in fact, would be to change the provision requiring attorney general decisions like that regarding the COD board meeting in question to be binding rather than advisory.

Lawmakers did take a small step in the right direction this session, approving legislation - co-sponsored in the House by Barrington Hills Republican David McSweeney and Democrats Jack Franks of Marengo and Carol Sente of Vernon Hills and in the Senate by Republicans Dan Duffy of Lake Barrington, Pamela Althoff of McHenry and Michael Connelly of Lisle - that increases agencies' accountability to Open Meetings requirements. Arising from an Oakwood Hills development controversy in which a possibly illegal meeting wasn't discovered until nearly a year after it was held, the bill permits citizens to sue over violations within 60 days of learning about a questionable meeting rather than 60 days of the meeting itself.

But disturbingly, much of the action in the legislature has come from the other direction. Chicago Democratic Sen. Barbara Flynn Currie introduced a bill last fall that would make it harder for citizens to fight for public records and easier for governments to withhold them. Blue Island Democratic Rep. Robert Rita introduced a bill in February that, among other sinister provisions, would keep the public from being able to see incentives offered to and rent paid by businesses and entertainers who use public facilities like Rosemont's Allstate Arena.

The scrutiny of COD's open meetings record has its own value and particular lessons. But it also emphasizes a broader message - the need for constant vigilance not just to improve transparency in Illinois but to protect from assault and erosion what little transparency already exists.