Elmhurst's Secret Meeting Minutes Growing

ELMHURST, IL — The pile of Elmhurst's closed session minutes that are being kept secret is growing.

A year ago, the City Council approved a resolution keeping 262 sets of closed session minutes going back more than three decades secret. That number increased to 269 in December, then to 274, with the most recent minutes from April 19.

Under state law, the city must review which minutes to keep under wraps every six months. The last two times, the City Council agreed with the administration's recommendation to keep all the minutes secret. That is the recommendation again for Monday's City Council meeting.

The council sometimes releases the records. In February 2018, it divulged 46 sets of minutes, ranging from 1995 to 2016. And in December 2019, it released 17 sets of minutes, dating from 2006 to 2018.

The first set of closed session meeting minutes being kept secret was from Aug. 14, 1989. According to a city memo, 27 sets of closed session minutes were for meetings in the 1990s, 80 from the 2000s and the remaining 166 since 2010.

The minutes from recent years may be considered more sensitive, with the issues still fresh on people's minds, likely the reason many more are kept secret.

While most public issues must be discussed in the open, the open meetings law makes exceptions for discussions of union negotiations, specific personnel, real estate purchases, and pending or probable litigation.