Election 2011: Village Candidates on Transparency and FOIA

April 5 is coming up fast. To help you get to know the candidates for the contested Woodridge elections, we asked the candidates for the and the a set of questions. We'll be posting the answers to those questions throughout the week.

How good of a job do you think Woodridge does with transparency and making public information easily available to residents and other citizens? What, if any, improvements could be made to public access and the system for Freedom of Information Act requests in Woodridge?

I believe Woodridge has a long way to go with the issue of transparency. We are only now getting ready to televise Village Board meetings, long after every other town in the area. It is very difficult to find out how Woodridge spends taxpayer dollars. I will fight to fix that so that all pertinent fiscal information is put on the website and made easy to find. If government is truly open, we should be able to greatly reduce the need for FOIA requests. It’s the people’s money and they are entitled to know what their government is doing with it.

In my opinion, the village does a reasonably good job addressing Freedom of Information Act requests. Freedom of Information Act can cost the taxpayers a lot of money. It is difficult to extract the information.

One of the Village’s top goals was governmental accountability and transparency. Several areas have been addressed and in place – our residents can now view financial reports, audits, budget and check registers on our website, and the Police Department is part of a program which allows residents the ability to view crime statistics in their neighborhood. This is the result of requests from the people to be more involved and in tune with the Village. In addition, the Village Clerk’s office has been very involved in training for and implementing the new FOIA processing
procedure which complies with the new state law.

The village does an OK job with transparency. I think that we should have as much
information as possible up on the website so that there isn’t a need for the costly and time consuming requests. We need the help of the state of Illinois on this as well so that we can direct residence to the website as a method of fulfilling the request. I understand that the village has to fulfill the request even if the information is on the website.