Business is booming at the state attorney
general’s fledgling open-records division, but that’s not
necessarily a good thing. Terry Mutchler, the state’s first-ever
public-access counselor, says she’s been so swamped with inquiries
and complaints from the media, the public and government officials that
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, her boss, plans to hire another
attorney to help ensure that government obeys the state’s
public-records and open-meetings laws. Mutchler, who started work a year ago, says that
she’s received more than 1,000 complaints and inquiries. Just 70 have
come from the media, she says, undermining complaints from Madigan critics
who once accused the attorney general of pandering to the press by
establishing the public-access post last year. Indeed, one of the first places she went in her quest
to get government to obey the state’s Freedom of Information Act was
Madigan’s own office, Mutchler told a dozen journalists at a Jan. 18
seminar on the state’s open-records and public-meetings laws
sponsored by the Illinois Press Association. The office culture tolerated
staff members who didn’t act promptly on requests made under the
FOIA, Mutchler says, so she held in-house sessions on the law’s
requirements. “People would say, ‘It’s just a
FOIA request,’ ” Mutchler says. “The attorney general is
very serious about it and has told people, ‘This is on my radar
screen — I want compliance.’ She wants to hire an additional
attorney and a support-staff person. I’ll be very happy when we get
another attorney.” The Society of Professional Journalists honored
Madigan last year for establishing Mutchler’s post. Mutchler says she
thought that interest in the new office would decline after the initial
barrage of headlines, but the opposite has happened, judging from the
volume of calls she gets. “The numbers are going way up,” she
says. During a two-hour session with reporters, Mutchler,
who worked for the Associated Press before getting her law degree, sounded
every bit a commiserating journalist. She pointed out that Illinois was the
last state in the nation to pass a public-records law (the Watergate
scandal of the early 1970s spurred many states; Illinois waited until
1984). Unlike lawmakers in other states, Illinois lawmakers didn’t
use 9/11 as an excuse to close public records, Mutchler says, because the
law already had so many loopholes. The Illinois law delineates 54 reasons
the government can deny a public-records request. By contrast, the federal
open-records law contains just nine exemptions. Without going into details, Mutchler says that the
state law needs to be amended. One problem, she says, is that the law
doesn’t include any punishments for violations. The only recourse is
to sue an agency or hope that scofflaws will be embarrassed enough by
public scoldings to obey the law. That doesn’t always work. In Des
Plaines, for example, the city has continued withholding terms of a
settlement with a former city employee who had sued the city, claiming that
an alderman had sexually harassed her. The city is keeping the information
secret even though Mutchler in December issued an opinion stating that
legal settlements are public records. “Public relations factors into every FOIA
issue I’ve dealt with,” Mutchler says. “It’s an
uphill climb with public officials.”
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2006.
