ECEIVED 5. 3.

2017

Illinois Attorney General' s Office OMA Department, MAY 0 8 2017

Public Access
Counselor
I am writing to formally request an investigation for OMA violation. FOIA documents that we
have obtained contain evidence and reason to believe that the Boone County Fire District #2 Board Of
Trustees willingly and deliberately violated the Illinois OMA. The emails we received via FOIA were first
sent to the fire district' s attorney for screening prior to being sent to us. This filtered out many critical
documents that are pertinent to your investigation. The documents we did receive however show a
pattern of discussion and decisions being made behind the scenes and not in the proper public meeting.
Be aware many of the email documents missing potentially had information that contained collusion
and blatant OMA violations by the Fire District Trustees that ultimately ended up in the employment
forced resignation of the districts fire chief Brad Bartell.

There are many additional details that need to be explained to the OMA investigation officer in addition
to this email that are critical to the background of this investigation. Although the attached document of
emails does display a violation of OMA of " off the record discussions" among other wanton remarks. I
took the liberty of highlighting some of the remarks in the 40 plus pages of emails.

The Boone County, IL States Attorney Tricia Smith has been formally briefed on the situation and is
aware of the allegations.

The Boone County Fire District # 2 Board Of Trustees has a long history and behavioral pattern of ethics
issues. The additional emails that the Attorney General' s office would be able to court subpoena from
the trustee' s email providers would ultimately disclose many other OMA violations that have been
buried by the Fire Districts Attorney. As you can see in the mail chain there are several emails missing
from the chain. This would ultimately fuel a potential criminal investigation against the trustees if any
incriminating documents were uncovered due to the Attorney General' s Office investigation into the
OMA violations.

In addition to this OMA violation investigation we have also filed a complaint against the FOIA
documents received due to not all information being provided.

Please contact me below for any additional information.