The Public Access Counselor of the Illinois Attorney General’s Office (PAC) recently published its annual report for 2022 providing statistics on the work done by that office in 2022, including summarizing all of the binding OMA and FOIA opinions issued in 2022 (13 in total) and providing summaries of a few of the advisory opinions and informal resolutions from last year. You can find the report here.
Regular readers of Municipal Minute know that we regularly report on the PAC’s binding opinions. However, we can only report on advisory opinions and other more informal determinations of the PAC when we become aware of these unpublished records. Today, and in future posts, we will take the opportunity to inform our readers about some of these unpublished determinations from 2022.
Ill. Att’y Gen. PAC Req. Rev. Ltr. 70125
In March of last year, the PAC issued an advisory opinion that answers a question that occasionally comes up regarding the 48-hour agenda posting requirement under the Open Meetings Act, and whether that requires posting the agenda 48 “business” hours or “calendar” hours before the meeting. We have taken the position that unless a statute specifically refers to “business” days or hours, then the time is measured in calendar days and hours. The PAC confirmed that interpretation in a March 18, 2022 determination (issued on March 18, 2022), finding that the agenda posting requirement of 2.02(a) of the OMA does not require the public body to post its agenda 48 business hours before the meeting.
So, if a public body has scheduled a meeting for Monday night at 7:00 p.m., the agenda for that meeting must be posted no later than Saturday night at 7:00 p.m., i.e., 48 “calendar” hours prior to the meeting.
Stay tuned for more summaries of recent PAC FOIA and OMA determinations.