The City of Chicago has denied a Freedom of Information Act request by TV station NBC5 for city records on a Kansas-based company, Favorite Healthcare Staffing, which billed the city for $57 million to staff migrant shelters around the city.
The burden of redacting the records, the city’s letter says, “outweighs the public interest in the information.”
What is the news outlet so curious to know?
Back in August 2022, city finance records show that Favorite Healthcare Staffing has billed the city for $57 million. The only problem is that no one in the city government will say what that $57 million was for. And what little information has come to light has only lit a fire under the news outlet that sniffs a good old-fashioned Chicago political corruption story.
Currently, about 1,600 migrants live in police stations across Chicago — a solution intended to be temporary.
One volunteer said the living conditions for migrant groups vary widely from station to station and depend on the officers in charge.https://t.co/7yh6SAACzp
— WTTW – Chicago PBS (@wttw) September 24, 2023
What’s curious about that denial letter is that the city already provided NBC 5 Investigates with two invoices – showing last December that a nurse at the High Ridge YMCA shelter earned than $20,000 in a week.
During that same week, a shelter manager made $14,000. Both figures did include overtime.
NBC 5 Investigates also received a spreadsheet showing a total of $57 million covering 498 payment vouchers. What’s not clear from the spreadsheet is how many employees that covers, how many hours were billed and if certain shelters billed the city more than others. Some invoices were for more than $500,000, the spreadsheet shows.
“To see invoices like that is disgusting,” said Alderman Raymond Lopez. “They’re outrageous. And they should be cause for an immediate investigation.”
“This requires a great deal of attention — a lot more transparency. The fact that news organizations are only given one or two invoices when they’ve requested thousands of them, to me is unconscionable,” said Alderman Brendan Reilly, who serves the city’s 42nd ward.
As my PJ Media colleague Catherine Salgado pointed out in her post on organizations making a killing on the shelter business, it’s not just staffing outfits that benefit. It’s charities as well.
The Mayor of Chicago took the low/high road — much to the amusement of the assembled press.
“So let me just make sure you are clear and everybody else is clear here: every single Monday there is a conversation with the alders, who are part of a working group. Every Friday there is an email that is sent. So all the alders can see it. We have released information providing the details of the fact that when we appropriated the first $51 million, I was the person that said that vast majority of that went to staffing…” Mayor Johnson said.
Yes, yerhonor, it went to staffing. But to whom? How much? There are apparently hundreds of invoices to this company, Favorite Healthcare Staffing, and so far, we’ve seen two of them. And that includes the aldermen who you say have been informed of the fact that the money went to staffing. But any specifics are unavailable because “The burden of redacting the records, the city’s letter says, ‘outweighs the public interest in the information.’”
Well, what did you expect? It’s Chicago, after all.
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