Secret votes

The Swami expects the coming city council meeting in Waukegan to be of interest on several counts.

First, the council seems determined to sue everyone who makes a buck on the lakefront to force them to leave and, in pursuit of that, have sued in Chicago federal court to force those businesses to pay for all the cleanup of PCBs in the harbor.

Of course, not all of them had anything to do with the contamination, and to be fair, if you’d sue who was responsible for letting the pollution continue, the city council of Waukegan might be in line to be sued. They didn’t do much to stop it. They thought it was just great while it was creating jobs.

Something needs to happen at this Monday city council that the council may not have thought about.

The council went into secret session a week ago and decided to sue. Talking about suits in executive session is permitted by the Illinois Opens Meetings law. But making a decision in executive session is not permitted.
As the state law reads:

(e) Final action. No final action may be taken at a closed meeting. Final action shall be preceded by a public recital of the nature of the matter being considered and other information that will inform the public of the business being conducted.

But the council gets a legal do over if it “ratifies” its final action with an open vote. We’ll see. If they don’t, the whole lawsuit can be challenged as invalid by the targets of the suit. We bet those targets will. (We bet they have good lawyers) We bet a newspaper might challenge the legality, too.

Someone, after all, should stand up for open government and democracy.

On the other hand, the city of Waukegan has a recent history if enacting dumb laws that get overturned by a higher court and becoming embroiled in lawsuits that don’t do much more than pile up “billable hours” (love words to a lawyer) for taxpayers to pay.