Harvey’s governing bodies bucking oft overlooked state transparency law

Harvey and numerous school boards are violating the state’s open meetings laws. 

The city, three school boards that serve Harvey families, the park, and library districts have failed to upload public meeting minutes to an easily accessible domain in recent months and even years.

While these bodies have been approving meeting minutes, they have failed to upload the minutes to their website. That’s a violation of the Open Meetings Act.

The OMA is the state’s transparency law that helps ensure public bodies keep meetings open and accessible to the public. That includes things like public attendance but also means the written record of those meetings—minutes. Beginning in 2006, the OMA requires a full-time staff member of governing bodies to upload minutes to its corresponding website within 10 business days of approval. 

But many of the city’s public bodies are bucking that mandate.

The HWH analyzed the behavior of all of the school districts that serve Harvey families, the Clerk’s Office, park, and library boards to determine the extent to which they complied with OMA by posting meeting minutes.

Harvey City Council has consistently approved meeting minutes between 2019 and 2023. However, the Clerk’s Office has an abysmal record of adequately posting those minutes on the website within 10 days. The Office last posted meeting minutes on February 13 of this year. The Office didn’t post 2022 minutes for the majority of that calendar year and slyly began back-posting at the top of this calendar year.

In the case of the Harvey Park District, there is no trace of meeting minutes—even agendas—anywhere on the Park District website. The South Holland School District 151—which has schools in South Holland, Phoenix, and Harvey—lists meeting agendas going back to January 2012. Over the past decade, it’s only uploaded minutes for 8 of its thirteen sessions. In 2016. 

As of June 17, four other entities have failed to upload minutes in accordance with the open records act. That includes:

• The Harvey Library Board, which last updated meeting minutes in June 2022. The last time the board uploaded minutes for every meeting in a given calendar year was 2011.
• West Harvey-Dixmoor School District 147, which last updated meeting minutes in October 2021.

Thornton Township High Schools District 205, which last updated meeting minutes on May 10, 2023, is currently in compliance with the open records law.

After being asked about their missing minutes Harvey School District 152 uploaded them to their website, though some are still missing as of the afternoon of June 17. Before the interview, District 152 last updated meeting minutes in October of 2022. 

Interim Superintendent of Harvey School District 152 Lela Bridges-Webb said she thought the minutes had been uploaded for the dates the board had approved. “You are correct. I do stand corrected, and she will be posting them shortly, because they’re ready.” 

She thought that one person, who she did not name, would stay on top of that. “So again, my apologies,” Bridges-Webb said. Bridges-Webb believes transparency is important to any public body. 

“When you are a public body, I think the public whose tax dollars help to support us, I believe that they should know how their money is being spent, what decisions are being made,” she said.

Aside from District 152, no other public bodies responded to requests for comment.

A rundown of the Open Meetings Act

According to Illinois House Bill 2124, or OMA, “All meetings of public bodies shall be open to the public,” with a few exceptions. 

Illinois Senate Bill 2356, or Minutes section of the OMA, states, “All public bodies shall keep written minutes of all their meetings, whether open or closed, and a verbatim record of all their closed meetings in the form of an audio or video recording.” 

SB2356 also states that the public body must approve minutes from an open meeting either after 30 days or in the second meeting following the meeting in which the minutes are from—whichever comes last. 

After approving the minutes, the public body must make the minutes available and accessible to the public within 10 days. But that doesn’t apply to all public bodies. 

“The website requirement only applies to certain public bodies. Only the public bodies that have a full time employee that manages their website need to publish meeting minutes approved meeting minutes on their website,” said Leah Bartelt, the Public Access Counselor at Illinois Attorney General’s office, which reviews complaints over OMA violations. “And so [as] an example for a city, that is going to be your City Council. There is no legal obligation to publish on a website the minutes of, for example, a zoning board, because that’s not a governing body.”

So, something like a volunteer-led subcommittee, such as Harvey’s planning commission, which is appointed by Mayor Chris Clark, would not be required to post meeting minutes online.

“The Open Meetings Act was passed because the public has a right to see what their elected officials – as well as employees of those officials – are doing,” said Chris Bury, the Senior Journalist in Residence at DePaul University. 

HB2124 makes it legal for citizens to attend any meetings held by public bodies and requires public bodies to make these meetings accessible and well-advertised. According to state law, the body is also required to upload a meeting agenda 48 hours prior to the meeting.

“In an open meeting, anybody can attend, anybody can record the meeting without any particular notice,” Bury said. “The meetings have to be posted and there has to be proper notice given at the site of the meeting.”

However, there are a few exceptions that allow a public body to close a meeting to the general public. “In a private meeting, the body must first meet in public and then vote and they need a majority of a quorum to vote to go into private session,” Bury said.

These include instances of personnel issues, discussions about an individual, pending litigation, or discussion about money. “A meeting can be closed given proper notice if the public body is discussing things like labor contracts, pay raises, real estate negotiations, grades of certain students,” Bury said.

Public bodies are also required to include three things in their published minutes: the date, time and place of the meeting, what members of the body were in attendance, and “a summary of discussion on all matters proposed, deliberated, or decided, and a record of any votes taken,” according to state law. 

The rules for closed meetings are a bit different. Bodies are still required to keep accurate minutes, but they are allowed to keep these minutes confidential. However, every 6 months, the body must review the closed meeting minutes to decide if confidentiality is still necessary.

“Once they’re in private session, the meeting still must be recorded in either audio or video and the public body must keep that recording for at least eighteen months in case it becomes the subject of any kind of litigation,” Bury said.

The Legal Process

Adjustments were made to the OMA when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed an Executive Order on March 16, 2020, to reduce the spread of COVID-19. This made it so public officials no longer had a requirement for being in person at meetings, but also created a requirement that all online committee meetings be open and publicized to the public. 

Governing bodies’ minutes must also include whether each member was present in person or online, a requirement to the pandemic. None of Harvey’s public bodies that HWH examined have minutes with that notation. 

If public bodies are failing to update minutes properly, there are steps citizens can take. “If for whatever reason a public body is violating the law, then the public—including the media—have the right to file a complaint with Public Access Counselor of the Illinois State Attorney General’s office,” Bury said.

Not all legal actions regarding the Open Meetings Act pass through Bartelt’s office.

“We do an initial review of the allegations they have submitted and forward the request for review to the public body,” Bartelt said. If Bartelt’s office discovers that “further inquiry” is needed, they ask the public body to respond with correct records and documentation.

“Ultimately, our office may need to render a legal determination as to whether or not the Open Meetings Act was violated by the public body,” Barely said. “If we do so, we have the authority to direct or request that the public body take remedial action to solve the problem.”

The consequences to a violation of the act depends on what the violation actually is. However, the Bartelt’s office—the Public Access Bureau—no authority in civil penalties. That, and people have only sixty days to file a complaint from the time which a violation is believed to have occurred, are some limitations of the office’s authority.

The PAC not only investigates OMA violations, but is also the body that issues rulings in these cases.

Click this link to file a complaint.