City of Palos Hills being investigated for Open Meetings Act violation

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how hard it is to find information about what is happening with the Palos Hills city government. A commenter hiding behind the pseudonym J3 accused me of “media exaggeration & untrue facts” when I said that Mayor Bennett and the City of Palos Hills seemed to violate the Open Meetings Act by not posting City Council Committee Minutes on its website.

I decided to test J3's theory by filing a complaint with the Illinois Attorney General’s office. Since Palos Hills never posts any committee agendas, nor committee meetings on its website, I filed one complaint about that Open Meetings Act violation. The complaint asked for proof, which is hard to provide when nothing is posted.

During my research, I also discovered that the City of Palos Hills had not posted City Council minutes since the first January 2014 meeting. I filed a complaint noting that Palos Hills is required to post minutes on its website within 10 days after the minutes are approved. This was easy to show, since the city hadn’t posted any minutes in months. All I had to do was create a screen grab to document the issue. Interestingly the city could always post the agenda, but never the minutes.

Last week I received a letter stating that the Illinois Attorney General’s office determined that “further investigation is warranted.” It seems that I’m not just exaggerating. There is an actual issue to be resolved.

Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that the City of Palos Hills has now posted all the missing meeting minutes on its website. I’m sure the next letter from the Illinois Attorney General’s office will note that the issue is resolved, which is fine.

The point of the Open Meetings Act is that people should have quick and easy access to government information. It’s nice that the City of Palos Hills is working on a new website, as J3 pointed out. However, the Open Meetings Act mandates information be made available within specific timeframes. There’s nothing in the Open Meetings Act that says “Hey, you people will just have to wait until we get around to providing the information on our timeframe.”

As I said in the first post, it’s time for Mayor Bennett to stop providing the minimum information and start creating the transparency required by the Open Meetings Act. Since it hasn’t debuted yet, we’ll just have to see if the new website is a step in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s no reason the existing website isn’t maintained. After all, if you can post a meeting agenda, there’s no reason you can’t post the meeting minutes in compliance with the Open Meetings Act.