PAC Finds Separation Agreement Was Not Exempt in its Entirety From FOIA

PAC Finds Separation Agreement Was Not Exempt in its Entirety From FOIA

  Tuesday, August 19, 2025    Julie Tappendorf

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In response to a FOIA request from a news agency seeking a named police officer’s resignation or termination records, a city’s office of public safety administration (OPSA) denied the request entirely citing the "private information" exemption in Section 7(1)(b) of FOIA, and the "personal privacy" exemption in Section 7(1)(c) of FOIA. In its 10th binding opinion of 2025, the Public Access Counselor of the Illinois Attorney General’s office (PAC) concluded that OPSA improperly denied the request in its entirety. PAC Op. 25-010.

First, the PAC noted that the "personal privacy" exemption of Section 7(1)(c) provides an exemption for "the disclosure of information that is highly personal or objectionable to a reasonable person and in which the subject's right to privacy outweighs any legitimate public interest in obtaining the information." However, that same FOIA exemption also states that the "disclosure of information that bears on the public duties of public employees and officials shall not be considered an invasion of personal privacy." Here, the PAC determined that the records withheld by OPSA concerned a public employee’s separation from employment which "bears on the public duties" of a public employee." As a result, the records should not have been entirely withheld under the "personal privacy" exemption of Section 7(1)(c) of FOIA. 

Second, the PAC acknowledged that Section 7(1)(b) of FOIA authorizes public bodies to discretely redact “private information” as that term is defined in FOIA. Because the responsive records to this request contained handwritten signatures and employee identification numbers (which fall within FOIA’s definition of private information), the PAC determined that this "private information" could have been properly redacted and the remainder of the record released to the requester. However, the PAC noted that this exemption would not justify withholding the records in their entirety.

Note that this opinion does not stand for the proposition that public bodies cannot redact personal privacy information contained in public records (e.g., separation records) so long as the public body demonstrates that disclosing that information would cause the subject a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy that outweighs the public’s interest in disclosure. 

Post Authored by Eugene Bolotnikov & Julie Tappendorf, Ancel Glink