In Shehadeh v. City of Taylorville, a “vexatious litigant” submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking all communications between one city’s police chief and another police chief during a two month period. The city denied the request, arguing that it was (1) unduly burdensome, (2) requesting communications that were not “public records” subject to FOIA, and (3) requesting communications that were exempt from disclosure under several FOIA provisions.
Under Section 3(g) of FOIA, a public body may deny a request if doing so “would be unduly burdensome for the complying public body and there is no way to narrow the request and the burden on the public body outweighs the public interest in the information.” While public bodies must meet a high burden to demonstrate that a request is “unduly burdensome,” the court here found that the request amounted to a “fishing expedition.” The court emphasized that the request was not limited to any specific topic and that the requestor could not point to any issue he hoped to discover in the communications. Because the requester did not identify a purpose for his request or any public interest that would be served by complying with it, and because much of the material would be exempt from disclosure, the court found that the city carried its burden of demonstrating that the burden on it outweighed any nominal public interest that might, theoretically, be served by complying with the request.
Even though the court found in favor of the city, it also offered critiques of how the city handled the request. This included noting that the city should have provided more detailed information concerning the burden of compliance, such as by estimating the number of records or the amount of time involved in obtaining and sifting through the materials for redaction and noting that the city should have communicated more clearly with the requestor about narrowing the request. Public bodies bear the burden of proving that a request is “unduly burdensome,” and it can be a difficult bar to clear. Nevertheless, this case shows that public bodies are not obligated to fulfill overly broad or unduly burdensome FOIA requests that amount to no more than a fishing expedition.
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Source: Shehadeh v. City of Taylorville, 2024 IL App (5th) 220829-U
