Daily Herald opinion: This is a show of commitment?: Painting transparency mistake as ‘minor’ overlooks its serious consequences

Last week, the Illinois attorney general ruled that tollway board members violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when they approved $68 million in spending while a reporter and other audience members were left outside the boardroom behind closed doors. Notice anything missing from the agency's response?:

“The Illinois tollway is committed to transparency and to ensuring its board meetings are fully open to the public, in person and online. (The tollway leadership) fully accepts the findings and recommendations regarding a one-time oversight and will ensure board meetings continue to operate in alignment with the Open Meetings Act.”

No note of contrition? No acceptance of responsibility for their “one-time oversight”? No acknowledgment of why the incident might raise doubts in the public mind about the tollway’s true commitment “to transparency and to ensuring its board meetings are fully open to the public”?

From the beginning, there was something suspicious about the board’s actions on Aug. 29, 2024. The board conducted business in open session at first, then went into closed session for presumably legitimate reasons and sent spectators out of the room for about 50 minutes. When the spectators were allowed back in, they were told the board had resumed open session and “forgotten” to open the doors. Not to worry, though, trustees and spokesmen assured everyone. They had remembered to restart the video recording of the meeting when they voted, so they had met the spirit of the state’s transparency law, if not its letter.

Our transportation writer Marni Pyke was not so sure they were right about that. She filed a complaint with the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. After hearings and an investigation, the office’s Public Access Bureau concluded the board violated several sections of the Open Meetings Act, first by merely failing to invite the public back into the open session and then by voting on public business on video while “the meeting was still closed as to the individuals waiting outside the board room.”

The tollway board would have us believe that the circumstances of this violation are technical and inconsequential, and the unapologetic tone of its response to the attorney general reinforces such a message. But there is much indeed about this situation that suggests otherwise.

Why, for one, was the closed portion of the session inserted into the body of the board’s regular business meeting? In their defense to the attorney general, the board’s attorneys wrote that it was because some directors had “other commitments” and the board feared it would lose a quorum needed for “fulsome discussion of important matters” if they left early. Yet, as it turned out, the board directors were on hand for both the executive session and the reopened regular meeting, leaving open the possibility, at least, that the board did not want a physical audience while it discussed these contracts.

On another point, it seems all but incredulous to suggest that a full board of seasoned tollway directors, plus their highly paid attorneys responsible for seeing to it that they adhere to state laws, would overlook closed doors to which they had exiled previous visitors but remember to restart a video. Did not one of these individuals remember that there were staff and other individuals just outside those doors? To answer yes to that question, one must assume either an attempt to paper over a sinister motive or an almost disqualifying degree of procedural incompetence.

And on still one more issue, one of the matters the board approved was a $25 million legal settlement with a contractor who had been the subject of a tollway contracting mistake the year before.

All of this raises natural questions that go beyond merely doubting the tollway’s commitment to open government. A tacit note that the agency “accepts” the attorney general’s findings hardly indicates recognition of the serious consequences of the offense. The tollway should admit it is sorry for leaving itself open to those, even if its leaders somehow think that unconsciously pushing a video button qualifies as transparency.