Burr Ridge Park District Settles Lawsuit Over Closed Meeting

BURR RIDGE, IL – The Burr Ridge Park District has settled a lawsuit over its effort to keep minutes of a closed session under wraps.

At its June meeting, the park board voted to end the litigation by giving $468.98 to open government advocate Edgar Pal. The money was to reimburse Pal for the costs related to the lawsuit; he had no attorney.

In an email to Patch on Thursday, Jim Pacanowski, the district's director, said the board's lawyer was confident the district would have prevailed. But the cost of settling was far lower than going through the legal process, he said.

Pal filed the lawsuit in April. A month later, the Village Board voted to release the minutes of the July 2023 closed meeting. This was when the park board discussed developer Bridge Industrial's plan for a major commercial development next to Harvester Park.

In February, the attorney general's office determined the park board violated the state Open Meetings Act when it discussed the proposed development secretly.

This opinion was in response to complaints filed by Pal and Burr Ridge resident Lisa Turano.

Although the opinion was nonbinding, the board voted to release the 16 minutes of discussion about the development.

Pal later filed a request for the closed session minutes, but the village denied him. The park district said it would decide on the minutes in the summer.

In his lawsuit, Pal argued that such a late release was after the statute of limitations had expired. He said the district had no justification under the law to keep the minutes secret when the recording was publicly available.

He told Patch the public needed the minutes because parts of the recording were hard to hear.

At the June park board meeting, member Patti Malloy abstained from the vote.

Through a public records request last year, Patch obtained an email from Burr Ridge Village Administrator Evan Walter about the development. He alleged Malloy distributed a document from the closed meeting in a breach of "executive session decorum."

Walter said the document was circulated in the park board's July 2023 closed session in which the board and staff discussed potential improvements to Harvester Park for the development.

In its August 2023 story about Walter's message, Patch questioned whether the park board could legally discuss the matter behind closed doors. A day later, Pal filed a complaint with the attorney general, largely basing it on Patch's reporting.

Until the leak of the document, the village was trying to keep the proposed development a secret. At the time, the plan featured a Costco, which neighbors later opposed before it was dropped from the proposal.

It was such a secret that Walter told Patch in spring 2023 that he was unaware of the possibility of a Costco coming to town.

Yet he had been emailing for months about the proposed Costco, even telling its representative that a Costco was a must in the development.