Evanston City Council Settles Transparency Lawsuit Filed By Local Watchdog

EVANSTON, IL — The Evanston City Council last month unanimously voted to pay $110,000 in attorneys’ fees to settle an Open Meetings Act lawsuit filed in 2021 over the city’s Board of Ethics and its handling of closed-session records.

The lawsuit was filed by local watchdog Edgar Pal, who alleged the city violated transparency laws when the Board of Ethics deliberated a range of complaints during closed sessions dating back to 2017.

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“This case has a long history. Although the lawsuit was filed in August 2021, the underlying FOIA requests date back to 2019, and the closed sessions of the Board of Ethics at issue were held as early as April 2017. In total, the events underlying this case span nearly a decade,” Pal said.

When Pal filed a Freedom of Information Act request in November 2019 for evidence of the board’s 2019 minutes, the city answered that no such records existed because the board lacked quorum, according to Pal.

Pal said the Open Meetings Act requires public bodies to revisit closed-session confidentiality every six months and said those rules are “accountability measures.”

“That did not happen here. The Board of Ethics failed to comply with those requirements, and even after becoming aware of the violation, it still did not correct the problem within the 60-day cure period provided by OMA. That failure is what led to this lawsuit,” Pal said.

City officials said the $110,000 settlement will be distributed to the plaintiff under the settlement agreement and will include attorneys’ fees and costs.

In total, this lawsuit cost the city $254,078, with more than half of that coming from Evanston's Insurance Fund to pay for outside counsel before the case was settled.

"This case also came at substantial cost to Evanston taxpayers. In addition to paying $110,000 toward my attorneys’ fees, the City retained outside counsel at Filippini Law Firm and paid that firm $144,078 – substantially more than the amount being paid under this settlement – even though Filippini was involved in the case for less than half as long as my attorneys were,” Pal said.

Pal said that in 2025 the Board of Ethics and the city produced every record responsive to his FOIA requests and represented that any requested records not produced did not exist. He also said the payment is going to his attorneys, not to him personally, and said he hopes the city improves its compliance with OMA and FOIA going forward.