Recent Court Decisions

“The public has a statutory right to address public bodies.”

A public body denied an individual the right to address it during its open meeting. The public body’s rules required individuals to submit written requests at least five working days before meetings. This individual’s request was submitted four days before the meeting and therefore denied by the public body.

A rule like this violates OMA. OMA requires public bodies to allow “[a]ny [individual(s)] …to address [them] under the rules established and recorded by the [it].” Rules for addressing a public body may only impose reasonable “time, place and manner” regulations that are necessary to further a significant governmental interest, e.g., maintaining decorum during public meetings. This rule did not. It did not even give the public an opportunity to see the posted agenda (required 48 hours before a meeting) before requesting to address the public body.

This opinion is binding only to the parties involved and may be appealed pursuant to State law.

Tax refund claims aggregating to more than $3 million, not including statutory interest, were denied in this appeal. In a prior appellate decision involving the same parties, the court found that the school districts’ transfers of assets from the working cash fund to the operations and maintenance fund were improper. That decision remanded the case to the trial court for determining whether, if the transfer had been properly made to the education fund, the subsequent education fund levy would have resulted in an improper accumulation of the assets therein. The districts provided evidence that no such improper accumulation of assets would have resulted. Consequently, there was no issue of fact remaining and the Appellate Court decided in the districts’ favor.

The Illinois Appellate Court decided that school districts are subject to cities’ zoning powers. The case arose when neighbors to a high school didn’t like the bleachers being built in the football stadium. The city issued a stop-order against the board prohibiting the continuation of the work on the bleachers. The neighbors sued the district seeking to privately enforce the city’s zoning ordinances. The court considered the board’s arguments supporting its position that the city may not restrict a school district’s land use. The court disagreed in an opinion that reads like a reply brief. The court relied on a provision in the School Code expressly allowing boards to seek zoning changes, variations, or special new uses for properties held or controlled by the school district. The court reasoned that this provision demonstrates that the legislature intended to subject the local school board to the municipality’s zoning regulations.

Here, plaintiffs alleged that a county board passed a sales tax in violation of the Open Meetings Act (OMA). The appellate court agreed with the lower court’s holdings. First, the OMA complaints by members of the public must be filed within 60 days after the alleged violation by the public body, although States Attorneys have a bit more time (60 days from their “discovery” of a violation). Second, the county’s meeting agenda titled “Superintendent of Schools Resolutions” was specific enough to notify the public that the county board planned to vote on imposing a sales tax.

For thought, see PAO 14-001, where the Ill. Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor (PAC) issued a binding opinion about another public body’s posted agenda item and its action upon that agenda item. There, the PAC held that despite the agenda item being posted, along with a readily available document online, the public body should have also provided a “verbal explanation of the significance of [the public body’s] action to members of the public who are present at the meeting before it can proceed to consider taking action” (that PAO is currently on appeal and is only binding to the parties involved).

For help with ensuring agenda items are sufficient under OMA, contact the school board’s local counsel.

This opinion is similar to PAO 14-007.

TRY: When a public body responds to a FOIA request, it must conduct a “reasonable search tailored to the nature of a particular request” and “reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents.” It “cannot limit its search to only one record system if there are others that are likely to turn up the requested information.”

TRY AGAIN: A public body cannot treat records request #2, which is identical to records request #1, as unduly burdensome when it never responded to records request #1. FOIA states that “repeat requests from the same person for the same records that are unchanged or identical to records previously provided (here, records from request #1 were never provided) or properly denied (again, records from request #1 were improperly withheld) shall be deemed unduly burdensome… .”

NARROWED REQUEST: A public body does not have to treat a narrowed request as another new FOIA request. That means that if the requestor tries to narrow the request in response to the public body’s explanation, it is not another new FOIA request but simply an extension of the conversation about the current request. While a requestor’s narrowing of his or her request does not need to be treated as a new request, the public body should continue to make efforts to respond to it.

This opinion is binding only to the parties involved and may be appealed pursuant to State law.