The Policemen’s Benevolent Labor Committee repeatedly sought information from the City of East St. Louis, Illinois, throughout bargaining between the parties in late summer and fall of 2022. The requests, sent on August 4, sought department headcounts by division, the current city budget, correspondence about retroactive pay, performance metrics, and the police department’s general orders. After receiving no response, the Committee followed up on September 19.
During a meeting on September 21 to discuss collective bargaining, the Committee again raised the issue of the outstanding information. A week later, on September 29, the Committee sent a follow-up email summarizing the meeting and escalating its requests. It now sought the personnel and discipline files for two specific officers, any related grievance or arbitration paperwork, and electronic pay stubs for all sergeants and officers below from 2016 through 2020.
Again, the City did not provide the information. On October 13, the Committee emailed once more, reiterating its previous requests and adding a new one: information related to a member who had been placed on unpaid leave. Another follow-up on October 21 reiterated all prior requests and sought information about another officer whose wages had been docked. Two final status inquiries were sent on November 10 and November 21. To date, the Committee had not received any of the requested documents.
The Committee filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Illinois Labor Relations Board on December 23, 2022. The City’s primary defense was not that the information was irrelevant or privileged, but that its production was being handled in a separate, ongoing circuit court case in St. Clair County.
The City argued it had not acted in bad faith but was diligently participating in the discovery process of that litigation, which involved overlapping issues and parties. It contended that any delays were due to these overlapping obligations and the complexity of the information sought, not a willful refusal to comply.
The case proceeded before an ALJ. Crucially, the parties had submitted a joint statement of uncontested facts, in which they stipulated that the information sought by the Committee in its various requests was “relevant and necessary” for the Committee to fulfill its duty as the exclusive representative of the bargaining unit.
In his Recommended Decision and Order, the ALJ ruled decisively against the City. He found that the City violated Sections 10(a)(4) and (1) of the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act by refusing to supply the relevant and necessary information. The ALJ systematically rejected the City’s central argument that the ongoing St. Clair County litigation justified the delay.
The ALJ reasoned that a union’s right to information is determined by the situation at the time the request is made, not by subsequent litigation or eventual compliance. Rights under the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act cannot be lost “simply by the passage of time and the course of litigation.” The mere fact that the information might be obtainable through discovery in another forum did not moot the Committee’s standalone statutory right to receive it promptly from the City.
The ALJ also found the City’s delay to be unreasonable. While acknowledging that factors like complexity and availability can affect response times, he noted the City failed to provide specific details explaining why the requested information was so complex or how the parallel litigation actually prevented a timely response. The City’s vague reference to potentially being “deficient in document retention” was likewise unsupported by evidence of what efforts were made to retrieve the records. Given the parties’ stipulation that the information was relevant and necessary, and the complete lack of production despite multiple requests over more than three months, the delay was unjustified.
City of East St. Louis, 42 PERI ¶ 22 (ILRB 2025).