Accessing Public Documents in the Carle-Urbana Tax Lawsuit

The tax law­suit between Carle and the Illi­nois Depart­ment of Rev­enue, The Cham­paign County Board of Review and the City of Urbana is ongo­ing, and has been so since before there was dirt … that is to say, 2008.

While the lawsuit’s con­stantly in the news, the actual fil­ings aren’t, a fact eas­ily explained by the vol­ume of those fil­ings.  While this is under­stand­able, there’s a lot to be said for hav­ing those fil­ings avail­able to the pub­lic in an eas­ily obtained form, rather than by pay­ing to get them from the court.

To that end, a cou­ple of weeks ago I took it upon myself to file FOIA with the City of Urbana to obtain copies of all these pub­lic fil­ings, a request that the City answered promptly and with great courtesy.

Here I’m putting up these pub­lic doc­u­ments pro­vided by the City.  In doing so I want to note a num­ber of things:

1. These fil­ings are the pub­lic fil­ings in the case, and only the pub­lic fil­ings.  Lawyer-client com­mu­ni­ca­tions are obvi­ously not pub­lic, so if you’re look­ing for those … well, that’s not going to hap­pen by FOIA, that’s for sure;
2. I’ve sep­a­rated out the docket for the case and am pro­vid­ing that as a sep­a­rate doc­u­ment.  The docket is the anno­tated record of all fhe actions in the case, it’s like the reader’s digest sum­mary of the detailed fil­ings.  Start with the docket, you’ll prob­a­bly not want to go much fur­ther than that;
3. For those of you so inclined, the rest of the doc­u­ments are in two sep­a­rate files.  The first is of a vari­ety of indi­vid­ual fil­ings, and amounts to about 30mb of data.  The sec­ond is, I think, the com­plete file, as it’s about 4,900 pages of infor­ma­tion in a 200mb file;
4. Given the size of these two doc­u­ment files, I’m only putting up the 30mb file right now, con­tact me for the other file, or I’ll put it up on dropbox.

Enjoy these doc­u­ments, dis­sem­i­nate them.  Not sure how many peo­ple want this level of detail, but these are pub­lic doc­u­ments that belong to the pub­lic, so I’m putting them up for any­one that wants them.

 

Carle-Urbana-Docket (5mb)

Individual_Filings (31mb)

Seem­ingly Com­plete File — email me (200mb)

 

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The image is a late 19th cen­tury sheet music cover from the Vic­to­ria and Albert Museum col­lec­tion, “The Belle of Bel­grave Square or Lady Audley’s Kitchen Maid’s Secret,” by Watkin Williams & C Solomons, pub­lished by Hop­wood & Crew.  See V&A Sheet Music Cover.  The V&A indi­cates it holds copy­right, I am assum­ing my repro­duc­tion here is fair use.

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