In the race of the governor of Illinois, Rauner and Pritzker see a clear need to promise transparency

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In the race of the governor of Illinois, Rauner and Pritzker see a clear need to promise transparency













					


			    







Since entering politics for the first time as a candidate five years ago, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has pledged his commitment to open government.

As he expressed during a debate last week with challenger J.B. Pritzker before the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times: "Transparency is excellent."

While fighting for re-election, making the statement is a great move on the part of Rauner, and an easy one. Voters demand more and more information about what their governments are doing with their tax dollars, and all candidates at all levels should speak in favor of sharing it with them.

But what Rauner means when he promises to be transparent is not so clear, given his government's habit of fighting against the disclosure of information. The governor's office does not even reveal how often it blocks the publication of records requested by the public.



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From January of 2017 to June of this year, the governor's office received more than 500 requests for registrations under the Freedom of Information Act of the state, according to a record that was given to me in response to a FOIA request. The record shows that the office received requests from journalists, unions, businesses and independent citizens who wanted copies of everything from the Rauner calendar to emails from First Lady Diana Rauner.

However, the governor's office would not provide me with records showing whether he granted or denied the requests, arguing that he was not required to do so in accordance with the law.

"Keep in mind that the Governor's Office is not required to answer questions or generate new records in response to a request from FOIA," one of the governor's attorneys wrote in a letter.

In other words, Rauner's attorney argued that his office did not have to disclose how he responded to FOIA requests because he does not have those records at hand. That means the governor's office maintained a detailed record of each FOIA request it received, who made it, what it was for and when it should respond, but said it did not follow up on whether the office provided the information or complied with it. the law. .

Either the office is not transparent or does not keep good records.

Even so, the response to my request was more direct than what another Chicago student, Sarah Jackson, got last year when she asked the governor's office for a FOIA record: nothing at all. The office never responded to him, according to a summary of the case by the office of Public access counselor to Attorney General Lisa Madigan, which handles FOIA disputes.

When Rauner's office did not acknowledge his request within two weeks, Jackson notified the PAC, who tried to find out what had happened. But Rauner's office did not answer those questions either. In December, the PAC issued a binding opinion ordering the Rauner office to produce the record.



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Jackson's FOIA request was one of more than 40 appealed to the PAC from January 2017 until this June, after Rauner's office denied them, according to the attorney general's records. In addition to Jackson's case, the PAC ruled three times that the governor's office had violated FOIA. On at least 16 other occasions, the governor's office responded or reached an agreement with the applicant after the PAC became involved. Most of the other cases were closed for administrative reasons. The PAC determined that Rauner's office had acted appropriately in only one of the disputes.

As I found in a recent investigationThe PAC office is late with FOIA appeals that often take months or even years to resolve. One of the reasons why there are so many cases is that public agencies throughout the state resist such requests.

Ann Spillane, the chief of staff for the attorney general, said the obfuscation begins with Rauner.

"We have an Illinois governor who is actively trying to undermine FOIA," he said.

But Patty Schuh, spokeswoman for Rauner, said her government remains committed to transparency and spends considerable resources to comply with the law.

"Our teams spend hundreds of hours each week reviewing documents to respond to FOIA requests in the most complete and timely manner," he wrote in an email. "We have produced hundreds of thousands of pages of responsive documents, and the volume produced by individual state agencies under the Administration could be in the millions."

Schuh described an office full of FOIA requests, including many that take many hours to process. She said the governor would be willing to work on "improvements" to the law, which was approved for the first time in the 1980s.

"The law does not adequately take into account the current reality that some government agencies, including our office, add hundreds of thousands of emails each year to their records, if not millions," Schuh said.

But Rauner did not sympathize with the burden the law placed on his predecessor, Pat Quinn, who portrayed him four years ago as a product of the secret Democratic machine. He promised to bring a new level of openness to the state government if elected.

However, after taking office in 2015, the Rauner administration began to argue that it was exempt from many FOIA requests, even for basic records such as its daily meeting times. In September of that year, the PAC ruled against the governor, concluding that his calendars were public records.

His office then stopped naming the people he met with, and instead used only his initials in the calendars.

Susie Cagle, special for ProPublica Illinois


Rauner also fought repeatedly to keep emails from state officials secret. Last week, the PAC issued another binding opinion that emails are public records and their publication does not place an undue burden on the office.

As much as Rauner pursued Quinn, Pritzker spent the last year criticizing Rauner for hiding key decisions and scandals within his administration.

During the Sun-Times debate, for example, Pritzker accused Rauner of outwitting FOIA by writing emails that reporters were looking for while investigating a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires' disease at the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy.

"They were passed out because they did not want people to know what was happening, it was an effort to cover their butts, to make sure they were not responsible," Pritzker accused.

Rauner denied any crime. Instead, he attacked Pritzker for not disclosing details of his tax plan, and for obtaining his own tax cuts after removing the toilets at his Gold Coast mansion.




The governor had a point: none of the movements was a model of transparency.

Jason Rubin, a spokesman for Pritzker, told me that the Democrat "will make sure that his administration works in good faith to improve public access to information in all executive agencies," such as making more data and records available, presumably without the need for FOIA requests. In contrast, Rubin said that "Bruce Rauner has routinely avoided ethics and transparency as governor."

However, this week the rivals revealed similar notions about the opening and, especially, about its limits. Each of the published tax records that show more than $ 50 million in revenue last year. However, each refused to allow the public to see the schedules or attachments showing the deductions and other financial details. news reports have found Each of them has investment networks that extend to offshore tax shelters.

Some claims of transparency are easy to see.

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