Comment by qingcharles
1 month ago
I don't think FOIA is broken, it just needs some tweaks. One of the tweaks OP is involved with is changing the FOIA law to allow for the type of request he made. This is the only way to fix the poorly-decided Ill. S. Ct. case now.
There does need to be a better incentive for public bodies to do the right thing, though. I get a ton of weak, half-baked responses, and a ton of push-back. A lot of it feels like laziness. There is no decent punishment in Illinois for workers or bodies that don't make a reasonable effort to respond.
This is basically how FOIA responses go:
Tweaks like you describe are exactly what I think are doomed. The problem isn’t some small wording in the law that we just need to adjust. The problem is that (1) info request of complicated systems by their nature require good-faith coordination by both inquirer and respondent but (2) the agency responding to the FAOI request is incentivized to obstruct. This is why legal discovery is such a nightmare and so inefficient.
“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.
>“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.
That's the reality every vendor rep's job exists in and most of them are quite helpful.
I mean this is a long conversation but the major differences are: (1) agencies are mostly incentivized to do other stuff and (2) it's hard to objectively assess helpfulness per se rather than sales.