Ask your town clerk about Freedom of Information Act requests, and he or she will probably sigh. Or curse. Democracy can be a hassle.
In an information age with increasing emphasis on citizen journalism, many front-line government workers spend a lot of time at copy machines fulfilling FOIA requests. Clerks in one central Illinois town got so bogged down with requests from one person that they spent most of their days searching for and copying records.
“They were so overloaded, the only thing they were doing was FOIA requests. They couldn’t do anything else,” Joe McCoy, legislative director of the Illinois Municipal League, told us.