Put some teeth in public information law, commission told

When the Better Government Association used the state's Freedom of Information Act in 2006 to try to get a copy of all the federal subpoenas raining down on Gov. Blagojevich, it was basically told to pound sand.

The governor's attorney told the BGA, Attorney General Lisa Madigan testified Thursday, that he could neither confirm nor deny that the governor had been served with subpoenas. And in the event that Blagojevich had received subpoenas, the attorney told the BGA they wouldn't turn them over anyway, Madigan testified.

So the BGA asked Madigan, the state's lawyer, to weigh in, and she wrote Blagojevich's attorney to say she thought the law required the governor to turn the documents over.

"Who asked you?" was essentially the reply, Madigan told the Illinois Reform Commission Thursday.

The commission, headed by Lisle native Patrick Collins, is considering ways to reform Illinois Government in the wake of one former governor's incarceration and his successor's removal from office. Clearly, Thursday's testimony indicated, speakers wanted to focus some attention on strengthening the Freedom of Information process.

Once Madigan had no luck helping the BGA, the good-government agency was forced to embark on a costly legal Odyssey, suing Blagojevich to try to obtain the documents. It did, and it won. But it took two years and $40,000 in attorneys fees, said Don Craven, an attorney who worked on the case. Blagojevich probably spent $250,000 of the taxpayers' money, trying to keep public information secret, Craven estimates.

Why?

Why not? There's no penalty for breaking the Freedom of Information Act.

"There was absolutely no fear of having to adhere to the law," said Madigan. "We need to legislate penalties."

But that may not be as easy or as fair as it sounds, some at Thursday's hearing said.

After all, monetary penalties don't punish the government official breaking the law, pointed out Collins. It only penalizes the taxpayer who has to foot the bill.

And criminal penalties for a low-level clerk in a small municipal government who may not even be familiar with the law would be too onerous, said Roger Huebner, general counsel of the Illinois Municipal League, which represents Illinois towns and cities.

One compromise suggested by Madigan would be to give the Attorney General's Office legal power to issue opinions in FOIA disputes that would be legally binding on the government agency.

Chicago Inspector General David Hoffman, a member of the commission, had another suggestion: governments can't keep from you information they've already turned over. In addition to beefing up the FOI law, require governments to preemptively post online more and more documents, Hoffman suggested.

John Wonderlich, program director of the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D.C., agreed that is a helpful measure. And what's most helpful, he said, is the posting of entire government databases. That allows individual users to download them and comb them for the information they want, rather than letting the government present the information with its spin.

In the end, the commission agreed to present by Tuesday a recommendation to Gov. Pat Quinn, who commissioned the panel, of some small measures that can be changed by executive order. It agreed to make a more in-depth legislative recommendation within 80 days when it issues its final report.