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Reporters use the FOIA regularly to nudge government officials to produce documents or data. But researchers, attorneys, businesses, activists, and other people also submit FOIA requests all the time, and while it’s a necessary tool for collecting information about our public offices and agencies, it’s even more useful as a reminder to public officials that those records don’t technically belong to them–they belong to us, their funders and employers.
I bring all this up as a way to say that I recently sent out FOIA requests to a few Illinois public officials. Under the state law, public bodies have seven working days to respond to requests in writing, and in fact most of my requests were complied with in a few days.
Yet several days after I left some voice messages asking about the status of my FOIAs, one of the slow-moving officials replied with a letter: “I am asking for an extension to your official request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act,” it said. “I will be on vacation and upon my return I will forward you that information.”
