Are your government agencies transparent & accountable to you?
By Sarah Conway
Last month we released our 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. We found that local agencies have a lot of room for improvement: 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.
Still, our grading system doesn’t capture all transparency efforts (and barriers) in local government, since we were limited to categories that could be reasonably measured across our full group of 148 agencies. As we get ready for the holidays, here are some local government agencies that are on the naughty or nice list for public accessibility.
Nice List
The Illinois Pollution Control Board website has a full section for public resources like newsletters on rulemaking and how to file complaints against alleged polluters. The board creates rules to restore and protect the environment and hosts public forums where citizens can actively participate in environmental decision-making. It’s even published a Citizens’ Guide that describes the board, its inner workings and common ways members of the public can get involved.
The executive director of the Chicago Board of Ethics posts public reports that sum up each board meeting, including details that were private at the time but can be made public after the fact. These summaries are posted within a day or two of the meeting, instead of the full month that it typically takes for meeting minutes to be posted.. The December 6 executive director’s report included a plain-language breakdown of a bill that would prohibit elected officials from acting as lobbyists on behalf of private clients as well as tighten disclosure rules for city employees & officials whose relatives are lobbyists..
Cook County Health does a great job posting slides, agendas and more from board and committee meetings on its website. You can dig through presentations, like this one on the social determinants of health in Cook County, that detail what structural determinants, like racism and sexism, and social determinants, like affordable housing and walkable neighborhoods, are and how they lead to health inequities in Chicago.
The Chicago Housing Authority encourages the public to stay up-to-date on public housing in Chicago with a website that includes information on upcoming board and public meetings, announcements, agendas, minutes and resolutions. Though other agencies make this information public, we’re shouting out CHA for making it easy to access this information in one spot.
You may already know about Special Service Areas, known as Business Improvement Districts or BIDs in other cities. The City levies a special tax on property owners within a certain area and then that money is used to provide extra services like auto and bike transit, trash pickup, security and beautification in that area. The mayor appoints SSA Commissioners for each SSA to oversee and recommend the annual services, budget and other decisions. While some SSAs have been caught up in controversy or secrecy, the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce actively solicits public involvement on their website and encourages and welcomes members of the public to join one of their several committees.
Naughty List
The Chicago Community Land Trust is on our naughty list for not having a main webpage on the city website since June and for posting its schedule in PDFs that sometimes list outdated information. On October 3, Documenter Helena Duncan went to live-tweet a morning meeting of the Chicago Community Land Trust (CCLT) Finance Committee, faced multiple barriers to accessing the space, and eventually left because the meeting information was incorrect. (This agency, founded in 2006 to provide working Chicagoans with opportunities to purchase homes, has faced extra scrutiny since a 2017 Inspector General report found that it has never received enough funding to achieve its mission, and this year, it was suggested that the program should “explore the possibility” of sunsetting.)
Even when meetings are technically accessible, some agencies create barriers that discourage people from attending. For example, security guards at City Hall often ask our Documenters for press passes in order to enter public meetings, even though by law they are open to everyone. On October 8, Documenter Ellie Colbert went to document the board meeting at the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust Fund, the “largest city-funded rental assistance program in the nation.” Colbert noted that security asked to see her ID at the front desk, and since she wasn’t on the list for the meeting, the security guard had to call up to the board and ask if she could attend as a guest. While she was ultimately approved, when she got up to the 19th floor, the door was locked and a staff member had to come out to unlock it.
It's not illegal, but it's definitely not in the spirit of open and public meetings for the Chicago police to compile full criminal background checks on people who spoke at public meetings of the city’s police disciplinary panel, which had been happening since at least January 2018, according to reporting by the Chicago Tribune. Though the Police Board said it discontinued the practice after the Tribune article came out, critics called it “intrusive,” “an invasion of privacy,” and Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who previously led the agency, said she was “furious” after finding out about the practice.
Bonus: All we want for Christmas is...
Our Documenters, who attend dozens of meetings each month to take notes and promote transparency, say they wish that members of the public could access the packets that board members receive in development-related meetings that include detailed images of proposals. Public bodies in Chicago typically don’t share those widely because they’re long and the information is often not finalized yet. We understand. However, we think the info could be organized in a different way for public consumption. We’d love in particular for the Community Development Commission, the Chicago Plan Commission and zoning meetings to find a way to share this information with members of the public.
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