SWAN Board,

The OMA letter looks good to me. Unless I hear otherwise from any of you, I will give Kathie the go ahead on Monday.

Aaron Skog
SWAN Executive Director
125 Tower Drive
Burr Ridge, IL 60527
Phone: 630.734.5122
Fax: 630.734.5056
aaron.skog@railslibraries.info
http://support.swanlibraries.net

From: Kathie T. Henn [mailto:KTHenn@KTJLAW.com]
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2014 1:25 PM
To: Aaron Skog; April Krzeczkowski (limricc.april@comcast.net); Judy Hutchinson; Don Myers
Cc: Richard Shurman (rshurman@ccs.nsls.lib.il.us); Gerard E. Dempsey
Subject: draft letter to Public Access Counselor

Aaron, April, Judy and Don:

Attached is a letter we prepared on behalf of CCS seeking an advisory opinion from the Public Access Counselor ("PAC") with respect to OMA and FOIA. I have spoken to some of you about this issue and wanted to send you the draft letter so that you can see what we would like to send to the PAC.  I know this issue is of interest to all of you.  If the PAC decides that OMA and FOIA do not apply, your board could always decide to comply with either or both statutes.  I believe that many of your boards may continue to comply with OMA, at least for governing board meetings, but that they would be interested in dropping the FOIA requirement.

We submitted a similar letter on behalf of LIMRiCC in 2010.  At that time, the feedback the PAC provided was that this question was not of general importance and did not impact enough entities for them to provide an advisory opinion. That is the reason why we felt it would be helpful to seek to include a number of intergovernmental entities to illustrate to the PAC that there are many such entities in the state of Illinois.

Please let me know if you are interested in participating in the submission of this request.  Also, let me know if you want to present it at a board meeting for discussion and the date that your board meeting will take place.    I would be happy to discuss this by telephone with you, but I thought it might be beneficial to provide you with a copy of the letter and allow you an opportunity to review it before we discuss the issues.

Please contact me with any comments or questions.

Thanks,

Kathie Henn

Klein, Thorpe and Jenkins, Ltd.

20 N. Wacker Drive, Suite 1660

Chicago, Illinois 60606

telephone: 312.984.6424

fax:  312.984.6444