Just a few lines about Neal Pollack’s cover story about Mayor Richard Daley and open government [May 5]. It is well done and I commend your treatment of the issue, which is vital to the future of the city. However, the reply by mayoral chief of staff Gery Chico [Letters, May 12] is terribly disappointing. Mr. Chico claims the mayor has “respect” for all the people of Chicago and that “government [should] be as open and accountable . . . as possible.” This mandate was clearly not met during the recent primary election. Mr. Chico’s reply failed to address several key issues raised by the article. I’d like to finally clear the record on the administration on its treatment of FOIA.
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We filed 38 Freedom of Information Act requests with the law department in an attempt to discern just how much money Mayor Daley and his council allies were willing to spend to deprive minorities of their share of city wards. This issue is currently being considered by the U.S. Court of Appeals. Our FOIA request dealt only with expenditure of tax money and was not related to personnel files and internal memos, which are exempt from coverage of FOIA. The request was filed on January 3, 1995, which gave the city plenty of time to respond before the February primary. The city did not respond within the seven day statutory period and subsequently denied our request for an accounting on February 9, 1995, three weeks after the seven day period. Ms. Nina Cadsawan, the department’s FOIA officer, said the late response was caused because she “lost” or “misplaced” the FOIA request. According to Ms. Cadsawan, it was only a matter of coincidence that “losing” the request prevented disclosure before the primary election.
We informed mayoral press secretary Jim Williams on March 9 that we were going to run a story about blockage of FOIA and file a lawsuit to seek access to the appropriate city records if we didn’t receive the requested information by the next day. Apparently this tough approach paid off, because on March 10, the city’s FOIA officer returned our call and agreed to provide us with many public records the city had all along. We were then able to publish a small article in our March issue about expenditure of city money on the ward remap case.
Illinois Politics Magazine
