Editorial: Senators, it's up to you to protect FOIA

Our message to the Illinois General Assembly on Tuesday ostensibly was this: Do no harm.

The House did some on Wednesday, and now Illinoisans who care about open government have to put their hopes in the Senate.

It hasn't gotten a lot of ink, but the future of House Bill 3796 should be of great concern to us all. It represents a potentially big step backward in Illinois in terms of the people's access to the workings of their government.

HB3796 emerged in the House this spring as an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act, the important principle that allows all of us - not just the press - access to a variety of information about the workings of government at every level in Illinois. The amendment quickly passed muster in the House and in the Senate before landing on Gov. Pat Quinn's desk.

He just as quickly vetoed the measure in June.

The bill seeks to address an issue of "voluminous requests" for documents and allows public bodies to charge specified fees for data, even when transmitted in an electronic format. It also allows for public bodies to forgo making copies or transferring such data if it already is available on that body's website.

All of this is designed to divert some of the financial burden on various governments that must employ people to look over Freedom of Information Act requests, research material, run reports and respond to requests.

Clearly there are businesses that use public information on a daily basis to make money. And that's unfortunate.

But if Quinn's veto of this bill in the veto session were overturned, it would affect a lot more than those businesses. The House moved in that direction Wednesday, voting 77-36 in favor of overriding the veto. The bill now goes to the Senate, where a three-fifths vote is required to override Quinn's veto.

Under the bill, those who make the ill-defined "voluminous requests" could be charged as much as $100 per request.

And as Andy Shaw of the Better Government Association points out, that would effectively price people with little money out of the public records market.

That is just plain wrong.

The spirit of FOIA is to shine a bright light on the inner workings of government in Illinois, and anyone who has lived or worked here knows how important that light is to illuminating what lurks in our darker corners.

Further limiting information access - whether by exceptions to the law or through financial impediment - to ease the burden on government is the wrong direction to take.

A better solution would be to publish a whole lot more public information on those governmental websites.