Intergovernmental Agreements (Mayor's Office)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act., I hereby request the following records:

A copy of all intergovernmental agreements.

An example of an intergovernmental agreement is: https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/city/depts/dcd/tif/T_014_CTACentralLoopIGA.pdf

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Matt Chapman

The records that I am seeking are those agreements that were created to satisfy the statutory requirements from (5 ILCS 220/) Intergovernmental Cooperation Act and other acts which include references to intergovernmental agreements, their creation, or maintenance. Of note, (5 ILCS 220/3.2). I am not sure how much further narrowing you'll need, as these are standard agreements throughout Illinois that should be readily available to maintain statutory requirements. Please reach out to the respective director, as defined by the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act.

Furthermore, the records responsive to this request will be used to build a greater public understanding of Chicago's decisions, policies, procedures, rules, standards, and other aspects of government activity that affect the conduct of government and the lives of any or all of the people. As such, I humbly ask that the unduly burdensome exemption be waived, as the public interest greatly outweighs the burden on the public body. Consider that the burden is placed on the public body to show that the burden on the public body is outweighted by the public's interest.

If absolutely necessary, I will accept all IGs from 2000 to the present date.

Please narrow my request down to the year 2000 and on.

Below is my response to Chicago's law department for a request with the same wording and overall use of the unduly burdensome rejection. I believe it applies to your agency. Please review.

The Department of Planning and Development has reached out to me and has informed me that this information is already made available online at https://chicago.legistar.com. That said the extreme and systemic use of the unduly burdensome exemption for intergovernmental agreements gives me caution that the records pursuant to my requests are actually all available online. Ie, if an agency was uploading agreements online by default, then those agencies would already be aware that the records are online, and so the use of unduly burdensome would be nonsensical. It's also my understanding that all Chicago departments who received this request had a meeting with Chicago's law department to discuss how to handle this request.

This leaves me to believe three things:

1. No reasonable search was ever done (excepting for the Department of Planning and Development)
2. Chicago's Law Department quickly, and erroneously recommended to all of Chicago's departments to reject my request as being unduly burdensome without having done any reasonable research or searches prior to giving any advice.
3. Not all records are available online.

None of these are acceptable.

So, again, I ask that you please re-evaluate the use of the unduly burdensome exemption. Should you come to the conclusion (as most already have) that my request is not unduly burdensome, I kindly ask that you reach out to departments that your department has worked with and withdraw any advice to reject this request for being unduly burdensome. If nothing else, I would greatly appreciate some deeper clarification as to why this request has been deemed so difficult.

That all said, I am willing to narrow down my request to 2000 and on if necessary.

Thank you for the followup. Could you provide some more information that would be helpful finding a comfortable middle ground? Your response doesn't provide enough information to identify where that middle ground is, so for now, please narrow this request down to 18 years worth of records. If 18 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 17 years worth of records. If 16 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 15 years worth of records. If 15 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 14 years worth of records. If 14 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 13 years worth of records. If 13 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 12 years worth of records. If 12 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 11 years worth of records. If 11 years worth of records is too burdensome, then please only provide 10 years worth of records.

Thank you.

Hi - have there been any updates with this request? This information is being used for ongoing research. Any help that you can provide to make these available to our organization, and the general public will be very much appreciated.

I am appealing this request, as the Chicago's Office of the Mayor is saying that they don't have a central repository of intergovernmental agreements. There is an online portal which, supposedly, contains all of Chicago's intergovernmental agreements. That the Office of the Mayor does not believe that they have a central repository of intergovernmental agreement makes me believe that either they do, and haven't done a reasonable search, or they don't, and their records management is inconsistent with the reset of Chicago. My hope with this appeal is to discover which is the case, and receive any intergovernmental agreements that aren't online.