At the Park Board meeting last night, Board President Tim Cassidy stated that “our board secretary [Joyce McLemore] was not familiar with the law” when she erased audio tapes of executive sessions that are to be kept for 18 months according to the Illinois Open Meetings Act. He added that the March 8 tape — the one requested in a lawsuit against the Board — “was not erased because of anything having to do with this [school siting] project.”

Cassidy also said that the fault for the erasures ultimately lies with the Board of Trustees, which he said “does not have a policy” on retention and disposal of executive session tapes. As a result, Cassidy revealed that “40 to 50 tapes were erased that shouldn’t have been.”

Just in case you’re wondering what the Open Meetings Act says about audio recordings, here it is from 5 ILCS 120:

Sec. 2.06. (a) 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.

[…]

(c) The verbatim record may be destroyed without notification to or the approval of a records commission or the State Archivist under the Local Records Act or the State Records Act no less than 18 months after the completion of the meeting recorded but only after:

(1) the public body approves the destruction of a particular recording; and

(2) the public body approves minutes of the closed meeting that meet the written minutes requirements of subsection (a) of this Section.

The part of the act requiring a verbatim recording of closed sessions was signed into law by Gov. Blagojevich on August 12, 2003, and took effect January 1, 2004. This would be during McLemore’s tenure as board secretary. She has been making recordings and storing them since January 2004, according to her testimony, so she was aware of and compliant with at least section 2.06(a). She also said she thought she could destroy the tapes after the minutes were approved and released to the public, which is one of the requirements for disposal as shown in section 2.06(c)(2). However, she was unaware of the 18-month retention requirement in section 2.06(c) and the public-body-approval requirement in section 2.06(c)(1).

All I can say is, the timing and scope of this error is most unfortunate. It appears that all the executive session tapes from the effective date of the law had been kept up until June of this year. Then all the tapes of meetings with approved and released minutes (40 to 50, according to Cassidy) were destroyed, just a month after a lawsuit was filed against the Park District regarding the proceedings of one of those tapes.

So far, comments to my blog have been 100% in defense of McLemore. And I have to admit that I have no axe to grind with the board secretary. We all make mistakes, and I’m not suggesting that I want her to go to prison over this or anything. However, given the circumstances, I think a certain amount of suspicion regarding this act is justifiable. Hence, I believe it should be investigated, if for no other reason than to remove that suspicion.

Otherwise, doubts will continue to linger, such as this one from Merle Widmer: “Of course many [tapes] were [erased]; who would just erase the most damaging tape without erasing a bunch of others to make it look like just a housecleaning act? No one in the tax funded public sector erases a tape from an executive committee closed session without the approval from at least three entities: The administrator, the attorney and the full board.”