EFFINGHAM — Effingham city officials plan to add a position to help manage the surge in Freedom of Information Act requests — a problem that is plaguing municipalities statewide.
Effingham City Administrator Steve Miller approached Effingham City Council members Tuesday about adding the position to provide support to the city’s FOIA officers. He said when the proposal was first brought up during budget, they were managing.
“But I don’t think we can manage anymore. We’re at a threshold here,” he said.
The number of FOIA requests to the city has increased exponentially in recent years.
“We’re just seeing a very big workload on this,” Miller said.
He said it’s not just an Effingham issue; it’s a statewide issue, and city managers have had many conversations about facing the same problem. He said AI-generated requests have worsened the issue.
“We see some companies that have kind of turned this into a business, basically, where they’ll submit for Freedom of Information requests, and then if you miss a deadline, they’ll ask for a penalty to be paid.”
City Attorney Tracy Willenborg said 11 communities in Effingham County are currently the subject of litigation, several of which she represents. She explained that part of the problem is software that tracks if the recipient responds to the request.
“I personally responded to several of them. Despite that, because their software didn’t pick up my email, they only tracked the email that it was sent to; they sued these communities,” she said.
Willenborg said some of the communities did respond. Still, their responses weren’t considered good enough, and under state statute the requester isn’t required to explain why.
“Unfortunately, the way the statute currently reads, it says (they) shall be awarded an attorney’s fee,” she said. “This is a money-making machine right now. It’s not for the purpose of transparency.”
Mayor Mike Schutzbach said the requests aren’t a “one-time thing.” He noted that some will send repeated requests to trigger a violation. A violation may also result in more requests intended to trigger another violation.
Willenborg said she also represents communities in surrounding counties that are being sued by the same company or companies and the same person.
“It’s the negative of what should be positive and has caused such a negative impact to the operations of all communities,” she said.
Willenborg noted that one case in which a community was accused of not fulfilling a FOIA request resulted in a $2,500 settlement. She said the issue affects more than just municipalities. It’s townships, park districts, fire districts – even drainage districts.
“They operate on such a shoestring budget that one case may put them under,” she said.
FOIA requests have created a significant workload for the Effingham Police Department.
The department received 66 requests in 2018. That increased to 525 in 2025, and as of Sept. 1, it had 362 requests, with the total projected to reach 600 by year’s end.
“The number of requests, however, only tells part of the story,” said Police Chief Kurt Davis.
FOIA requests have shifted from police reports to digital evidence, such as body-worn camera footage. One incident may involve several officers, each with a separate body-worn camera. A single FOIA request can therefore require staff to locate multiple recordings and review them individually to determine what can legally be released and what must be redacted. That can mean reviewing and processing hours of video in response to just one FOIA request, he said.
EPD has advanced redaction software, but even with that, Davis said it takes about 4 to 6 minutes to redact 1 minute of bodycam video.
“Consider an incident involving three officers, where each officer records approximately one hour of body camera footage. That one incident can produce three hours or 180 minutes of video. Using our reported experience of the 6 minutes of processing time for every minute of video, that equates to approximately 18 employee hours just to process those videos,” he said.
Davis told council members the requested footage is being posted to social media.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a few that have made it on TikTok and Instagram, and these people are doing it for monetary gain,” he said.
It’s also become easier to make requests, as Davis said many rely on AI to produce them. Recently, he said the department received a FOIA request clearly written by AI that included 18 different requests. It required three city employees from different departments to fulfill it.
“I had three of the 18, and it took me six hours to develop all the data that was needed just in those three bullets,” he said.
Automated, or bot, requests are another issue they can’t legally ignore, even though the requester must be an actual person.
“We have five business days to respond and request verification that the requester is a real person. We then have to track that request for 30 days to determine whether the required verification has been provided. If the requester never verifies that they are human, we ultimately do not have to fill the underlying request,” he said. “But our staff has still spent time reviewing it, sending the verification notice, documenting it, and monitoring it for the required period. And finally, responding with a denial letter because they do not have to fulfill it if it was a bot.”
He said those types of requests create an additional burden for staff.
While the General Assembly has introduced three bills addressing the issue, he noted they are currently stuck in committee and only target large cities in the state, not Effingham.
“We remain committed to transparency and to meeting our obligation under Illinois law, but we also need to recognize that the dramatic increase in both the number and complexity of these requests is creating a significant demand on our staff,” he said.
EPD Technical Services Assistant Sandi Rich, the department’s FOIA officer, explained that requests can involve hundreds of pages, years of records, specialized databases, audit logs, communications, videos, photographs, computer-aided dispatch records, officer information and electronic records from multiple systems.
“And these requests are coming from YouTubers, auditors, bots, attorneys, random people, and everywhere in between. We’ve had them from other countries. They do not have to identify themselves, even,” she said.
Rich noted the process involves more than just gathering the requested information.
“We have to review the records, make the appropriate redactions, document those decisions, prepare the response, and maintain the records associated with that request,” she said.
She said the most time-consuming part is requests for video, which can include footage from in-car cameras. Depending on the circumstances, video may contain victims, witnesses, juveniles, uninvolved members of the public, personal information, confidential law enforcement information, or other material that has to be carefully reviewed and redacted before it can be released, she said. That also includes cellphone screens and license plates of passing vehicles.
“And let me tell you, body-worn camera is fast. So when you have an officer that’s doing spins, and you’re seeing 50 people in 30 seconds, you have to take all of those people out, and that’s very difficult,” she said.
She said the software they use helps but only to a limited extent.
“It takes an engaged human brain to still see what you have in front of you and then be able to apply all the FOIA laws to it,” she said.
Rich estimates that about 21% of the department’s FOIA requests this year will involve video. She also projects she will spend nearly 1,900 hours this year on FOIA requests in addition to her other duties that include maintaining records, processing reports, responding to requests from officers and other agencies, handling subpoenas and other legal processes, maintaining systems, assisting the public, and managing evidence-related records. She also processes expungements, which have also increased.
It’s not just AI-generated requests that have increased; Willenborg has noticed more attorneys and others using FOIA for discovery because the recipient must respond within five business days, rather than going through the court system and the normal discovery process.
City Clerk Abbey Nosbisch, the FOIA officer for City Hall, sees many of those requests as she handles those involving potential litigation. Nosbisch said the number of FOIA requests she has received as of July of this year is more than double the number received in 2024. Each request, she said, immediately becomes a priority in her workload.
“A lot of mine is engineering firms, environmental inspection, buildings. But I also do all of the personnel, HR, possible litigation stuff,” she said, adding that understanding what information is wanted can be challenging at times.
The city purchased software to screen emails so it can catch all requests. Rich noted that, despite the time and resources the city spends, it can charge only limited fees, such as postage or the actual cost of a USB drive.
“So we’re not generating anything back into the city for any of that,” she said.
Davis added, “What’s really frustrating … there’s a lot of times that people request, and once we let them know that it’s available to them by either pickup or mail, they never pay their bill and they never come get it. So they did all that work for nothing. And I think a lot of that is just them wanting to see if the city’s willing to provide the information that was requested, and if they don’t, then they have a lawsuit.”
Willenborg described the proposed legislation for handling the flood of requests as “all over the place.” She is currently working on it with multiple municipalities, but added legislators aren’t close to an answer yet.
Information is also being gathered through surveys of public bodies to identify different solutions. Willenborg pointed out finding a solution isn’t simple. She said the goal of FOIA is transparency, so every shift thwarts that goal.
“And so there’s this battle of the goal and an answer towards the bad actors,” she said.
The council agreed to move forward with creating the position. Miller will bring back an appointment ordinance and final job description for their approval.