In August 2006, plaintiffs, Jerry Reppert and the Gazette Democrat, filed a complaint against defendants, Southern Illinois University (SIU) and SIU chancellor Walter V. Wendler, seeking disclosure of the employment contacts of several SIU employees. The Plaintiffs argued that the FOIA compelled disclosure of the requested documents. Defendant, SIU prevailed in the trial court; however the 4th District appellate court reversed in favor of the Gazette Democrat. The court held that the statutory definition of “public record” included the information contained in the employment contracts at issue in the case stating that contrary to defendants' (SIU) suggestion, the mere fact that personnel files are per se exempt from disclosure ... does not mean that the individual contracts are also per se exempt simply because they are kept in those files. The court declined to follow Copley Press in as much as it purported to include an employment contract as exempt from FOIA.

Local newspapers asked the Jo Daviess County Board to produce tapes of two closed meetings discussing real estate with the City Council of Galena and the Jo Daviess County Planning and Development Committee; the County Board refused. The newspapers filed a lawsuit seeking publication of the tapes and minutes claiming certain peripheral discussions about a lease during the closed meetings were not exempt from disclosure under the Open Meetings Act. On July 18, 2007, the Second District Appellate Court reversed and the Jo Daviess circuit court and ruled that no distinction for purposes of exemption from Open Meetings Act exists between the discussions concerning the “material terms of the lease” and the “peripheral matters such as how the lessee would utilize the space rented”. The court asserted that nothing in the Open Meetings Act draws a distinction between “material” matters and “peripheral” ones and creating such a distinction between them would be “exceedingly difficult to apply” because the line between “material” and “peripheral” terms “is bound to be either arbitrary or vague.” Therefore, the Second District held that the Open Meetings Act applies to tapes and minutes of the entirety of an executive/closed session - even to topics that may be peripheral and could be redacted.

A newspaper filed a FOIA request seeking two performance evaluations of the superintendent and a letter from the board to the superintendent explaining its discontent. If the documents fell into an exemption listed in FOIA, they would be “per se” exempt from disclosure. Here the requested documents were properly placed in the superintendent’s personnel file and were thus exempt from disclosure.

Simultaneously holding offices as a county board member and a school board member violates the Public Officer Prohibited Activities Act. In this case, the Kankakee County State’s Attorney sought an order seeking the ouster of a county board member. The individual first held the office of county board member before being elected to the school board. The Public Officer Prohibited Activities Act prohibits a county board member from holding any other office, except for several specifically enumerated circumstances not relevant here. The statute states that any such election is void. Therefore, rather than voiding the county board seat, the court voided the county board member’s election to the school board.

This decision has narrow applicability because it is based on a statute limiting county board members from holding a second office. The broader doctrine of incompatible offices is rooted in the principle of separation of offices as provided in the Illinois Constitution. The doctrine is intended to assure high quality performance with undivided loyalty. Appellate decisions have held that incompatibility arises if the duties of one office would necessarily prevent the office holder from faithfully performing all the duties of the other office. Under the doctrine of incompatible offices, the acceptance of an incompatible office is regarded by operation of law as a resignation from the first office.

A former employee sued school board members alleging that two of their closed board meetings violated the Open Meetings Act. In the first meeting, the school board voted to go into closed session “to discuss an employee matter, specifically the reclassification of employment” without giving a statutory citation. The court found that the Act does not require a statutory citation; it requires “a citation to the specific exception contained in” the Act. Said the court: “By referring to an ‘employee matter’ and ‘reclassification of employment,’ defendants adequately identified the exception in section 2(c)(1). An additional citation to the statutory subsection might have been helpful but was not required. Citing the exception was sufficient.”

The second meeting being scrutinized violated the Open Meetings Act because the reason given for going into closed session – “litigation” – was not supported by required information. Said the court: “The ‘litigation’ exception is a forked path. If the litigation has been filed and is pending, the public body need only announce that in the proposed closed meeting, it will discuss litigation that has been filed and is pending. If the litigation has not yet been filed, the public body must (1) find that the litigation is probable or imminent and (2) record and enter into the minutes the basis for that finding. Evidently, the legislature intended to prevent public bodies from using the distant possibility of litigation as a pretext for closing their meetings to the public.” The court remanded the case to the trial court for a remedy determination.