Dozens of Chicago and Cook County agencies fall short on Open Meetings Act and other open government standards, according to a City Bureau analysis.
By Sarah Conway and Pat Sier
Illustration: Ellie Mejía
Grades are out, and Chicago has an ‘D-’ average for its adherence to the Open Meetings Act and other public accessibility guidelines, according to a City Bureau analysis of 148 local agencies.
The data is published in City Bureau’s Open Gov Report Card, which grades how Chicago and Cook County government agencies share important meeting information like agendas, minutes and schedules with the public. Based on 11 criteria, only a fraction of public meetings in Chicago and Cook County received an ‘A’ grade—just 2.7 percent —while 85 percent of public agencies had a ‘C’ grade or below.
The average score for city and county government public agency meetings is 60 percent, an ‘D-’ grade. The only agency with a perfect score (100 percent) is the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which administers the election system for the city, including managing voter registration and safeguarding voting protections for Chicagoans.
James Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, said that their high score is a result of following the Open Meetings Act to a ‘t.’ “First off having transparent and open public meetings is the law and second, it’s a practice that the Board of Election Commissioners believes we must do in our meetings. We are pleased that we are getting this grade and we hope to continue to get a good score in the future,” Allen said.
Come to our Public Newsroom on Dec. 5 to discuss the data & ways to make government more transparent.
Within the data, these top findings emerge:
Nearly one-fifth (18.9 percent) of the agencies investigated do not have a public meeting schedule online. For instance, Chicago Community Land Trust, the controversial and troubled entity tasked with acquiring land for affordable housing development, does not currently have a schedule of meetings online.
Across the board, meeting times are very inaccessible to 9-to-5 workers, with 95 percent of meetings taking place between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. The Board of Education, a taxing body that oversees Chicago Public Schools, regularly holds long meetings during work hours.
When we could find a public comment policy, 61 percent of the time it was restricted in ways that the Attorney General says it can’t be. For instance, the Chicago Transit Authority, which has an annual $1.51 billion operating budget, requires people to register at 10 a.m. the day before in order to make a public comment; the Attorney General has ruled that agencies cannot impose any requirement to register before a meeting begins.
Only 19 percent of public agencies make recordings or livestreams of their meetings available online. Around 13 percent of the public agencies with meeting minutes online do not supply enough details as required by the Open Meetings Act. Despite Chicago City Council’s own rules regarding posting detailed meeting minutes, it is often the biggest offender.
The report card scoring system is based on 11 comprehensive categories that measure whether public agencies are truly open to the public. Six of the criteria relate to the Illinois Open Meetings Act, a law that stipulates that members of the public have a right to access a large number of state and local level government meetings; the public must receive prior notice of these meetings and they have the right to inspect meeting minutes. Five criteria are based on best practices of government transparency.
The City of Chicago Board of Ethics, which scored a ‘B’ grade, welcomes the Open Gov Report Card as a tool to hold itself accountable to members of the public and rebuild trust in local government, according to Steven Berlin, its executive director. “It’s critical for our agency to have accessible public meetings because we need to bolster people’s confidence by making our inner workings as transparent as possible,” Berlin said.
The data is a snapshot of these criteria, and a passing or failing grade is often not a full picture of the agencies’ record on transparency. For instance, though the Chicago Police Board received a ‘C’ grade, that does not account for this year’s Tribune report revealing that the Police Board has compiled profiles on every citizen who spoke at public meetings of the city’s police disciplinary panel, a level of surveillance that is sure to have a chilling effect on public participation.
As a counterpoint, the Chicago Public Library also received a ‘C’ grade although it’s made a substantial effort to hold meetings all over the city. Variance of meeting location, though it likely encourages attendance, was not chosen as a criteria because of the difficulty of setting a pass/fail threshold for that data.
City Bureau Documenters and staff pulled data from agency websites and public records requests from January 2018 to September 2019 on 148 public agencies concerning available information, public comment, scheduling and meeting locations. Click here for more information on data collection and to download the raw data.
Click here to see the full Open Gov Report Card site.
Nov. 19, 2019 — Correction — The percentages of agencies with public comment policy and recordings online has been changed due to incorrect information about the Regional Transportation Authority.
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