Those Park Ridge residents who oppose the principles of H.I.T.A. (“Honesty, Integrity, Transparency, Accountability”) espoused by our late Mayor Dave Schmidt got an early Christmas present a couple of weeks ago when relatively new City Attorney Julie Tappendorf proclaimed the City’s unique contribution to open government – the open-session performance evaluation of the city manager – violated the Illinois Personnel Records Review Act (the “PRRA”).

You can watch and listen to her sparse explanation of why that is by checking out the 05.16.16 meeting video, starting at the 1:36:10 mark and continuing for about 9 minutes.

Tappendorf pointed to a 2010 amendment to the PRRA which provides that “disclosure of performance evaluations under the Freedom of Information Act shall be prohibited.” You can read not only that provision (highlighted in yellow) but the entire PRRA by clicking here.

Tappendorf is no bumbler: she knows municipal law, including its various permutations like the PRRA and the Illinois Open Meetings Act (“IOMA”). But she makes her living exclusively by representing governmental bodies and by telling the public officials who run those bodies – both elected/appointed and bureaucrats –what they want to hear. Those officials generally are as enthusiastic about transparency as vampires are about sunshine. So the best way for her (and most/all other government-centric attorneys) to stay on good paper with those officials is to find ways to help them hide, and hide what they’re doing, from their constituents who pay the freight; i.e., the taxpayers.

When Park Ridge, with its iconoclastic City Council, was added to AG’s stable of governmental clients last year, it must have dawned on Tappendorf and her partners that they might have problems justifying our Council’s several year old process of reviewing the city manager’s performance in open session – with the individual aldermanic evaluations published on the City’s website so that each of those aldermen could be held as accountable for how HE evaluated the city manager as the city manager was being held for HIS performance – to their other government clients whom they’ve encouraged for years to run into closed sessions and hide such reviews from their constituents.

That meant Tappendorf couldn’t continue to let the City Council operate in the sunshine. The solution: steal our sunshine.

And not just by scaring our acting mayor and his six fellow aldermen into not publishing their evaluations on the City’s website with warnings about lawsuits, fines and the heartbreak of psoriasis. She also tried to stampede them into conducting the actual evaluation discussion itself in closed sessions, going so far as to suggest that the consequences of what the City Council has already done might be so dire that they shouldn’t even be talked about in open session where the unwashed public might actually hear the reasoning behind her opinions.

That reasoning could prove mighty interesting given that Tappendorf appears to be extending Section 11 of the PRRA – which was enacted back in 2010 and is expressly limited to FOIA requests – to City Council meetings held under the provisions of IOMA which permit but do not require ANY closed session discussions.

And although Section 11 has been in effect for more than five years now, we could not find one Illinois court decision interpreting or enforcing that Section consistent with Tappendorf’s opinion and advice; nor could we find any Illinois Attorney General opinion supporting Tappendorf. In the world of law and litigation, attorney opinions and arguments without the support of such authority are regularly disregarded by the courts, and should be.

That might explain Tappendorf’s desire to hide her reasoning in closed session, where the only alderman who might have the legal chops to challenge her opinions and advice is Ald. Nick Milissis, an attorney. But with Milissis’ expertise concentrated primarily in national security and terrorism matters, he likely would not be able to go toe-to-toe with Tappendorf on a matter such as this.

So far the only support we’ve heard for Tappendorf’s advocacy of a return to Star Chamber government, at least when it comes to evaluating the City’s CEO and highest-paid official, comes from known disciples of the pre-Mayor Dave “old style” of Park Ridge government, where the elected officials who weren’t content to simply bury their heads in the sand did their best to thwart transparency, scrutiny and accountability not only for themselves but also for their bureaucrat buddies drawing good salaries and accruing even better pensions on the taxpayers’ dime.

You can tell those supporters by their description of the open-session evaluation of the city manager as horrific, embarrassing, cruel, unthinkable, and a form of public humiliation.

Of course, that’s the same mindset that considers a lack of transparency and accountability by public employees, and annual raises unrelated to performance, as an acceptable form of entitlement. And that’s the same mindset that has prevailed, and continues to prevail, at the Star Chambers that pass for school boards at School Districts 64 and 207.

Tappendorf’s predecessor, former city attorney Everette “Buzz” Hill, described our City Council as “a unique outfit” with “an antipathy toward closed sessions” which Hill conceded might very well be “a real healthy antipathy” despite its being unlike anything he had observed in any of the various governmental bodies for whom he provided legal services. You can read more about Hill’s comments in our 02.02.15 post. While we disagreed with Hill on more than one occasion, that kind of acknowledgment by a long time public-sector attorney was itself unprecedented.

And accurate.

If this Council truly believes in H.I.T.A., and if its antipathy to closed sessions and unnecessary secrecy is as sincere as it is “unique” and “healthy,” it should demand that Tappendorf provide a memo (publishable on the City’s website) in which she sets out her complete argument – with supporting Illinois case decisions, if any exist – demonstrating that Section 11 of the PRRA: (a) legally prohibits the City’s voluntary publication of the city manager’s evaluations by each alderman, unrelated to any FOIA obligation or request; and (b) legally prohibits the Council’s open-session evaluation of the city manager even though such a discussion is permissible under IOMA.

And to avoid having to revisit this issue every year, or biannually with the seating of each new council, this City Council should require the next city manager appointee to sign an employment contract in which he/she expressly agrees to an open-session evaluation at the Council’s discretion. Any city manager candidate who subscribes to H.I.T.A. should have no problem doing so; and any candidate who doesn’t subscribe to H.I.T.A. doesn’t deserve the job.

To borrow a phrase from George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

And telling it publicly rather than inside the closed-session Star Chamber is a “unique” and “healthy” revolutionary act.

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