Request 013 — 1/13/2026

Hopped off the plane at LAX with a FOIA and a cardigan

Hey folks! It’s Tuesday! Happy foiaday!

We’ll keep tonight’s short. If you missed yesterday’s weekly update, I caught our weekly subscribers up on the requests of the past week, as well as filed a new request for some documents that I managed to tie to a cross-country road trip. (Check it out!)

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Rolling right into requests: I’m going to file for some records that can be found at airports and air authorities.

Illinois has over six thousand units of government, and of that, it has 29 air authorities. Many of them are for small, municipal or regional airports — like the Litchfield Airport Authority in downstate Illinois. But some are much, much larger, like the DuPage Airport Authority.

In Chicago, Midway International Airport (MDW) and O’Hare International Airport (ORD) are both overseen in part by the Chicago Department of Aviation.

I have no idea what kinds of records local air authorities keep, and the same goes for ORD and MDW, so I’m going to treat this like a fishing expedition and request for records retention and FOIA logs for the past year from a few authorities in Illinois.

There are some great examples on MuckRock for other requests that have been filed to airports, including social media settings for Sea-Tac, calendars and emails for SFO, and development and expansion plans for Reno-Sparks Airport.

Here’s the language I’m using:

Copies of the following documents:

- The current, or most recent, records retention schedule for the air authority. This is a document that lists out the types and descriptions of records kept by the authority, including how long each record is kept. Please send this in a .pdf format if possible.

- A list, log, or data sufficient to show all FOIA requests to this air authority between 1/1/2025 and 1/13/2026 (or whenever this request is processed). Please include the body or a description of the request filed, the date of the request, and the status or outcome of the request (like whether it was denied or approved). Please feel free to redact any personally identifiable information, and if possible, please release the records in a .csv or .xlsx format.

Things have been pretty quiet on the records front, and it’s been a lot of acknowledgements and some requests to narrow. For example, the City of Naperville asked me to narrow my request for code enforcement records down, but gave no explanation for how the request was unduly burdensome; meanwhile, other agencies, like CCSO, were very helpfully detailed about how things needed to be cut down.

Regardless — have a good night, and see y’all tomorrow with hopefully more updates! 

Best,

Cam