Public building - sheriff was wrong

On Wednesday Sheriff Keith Nygren of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department conducted a press conference for "credentialed media" in a conference room in the public building of the McHenry County Government Center, a taxpayer-supported building.

However, he limited admittance to the building's conference room and kept Cal Skinner (McHenry County Blog) and me out.

Nygren was wrong. He improperly (and perhaps illegally) prohibited members of the public and electronic media from attending this meeting. Since it was held in a taxpayer-supported building and outside a "secure" portion of the building, such as the Jail, it should have been open to Cal Skinner and me.

I'm awaiting the Public Information and Media Relations Policy, for which I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on Wednesday, before I left the building. Obviously, Lt. Miller could have given me a copy of it on the spot, but he told me I could FOIA it. The FOIA window was right across the hallway, and that's exactly what I did. So much for conserving taxpayer money and employee time!

As I've written before, the McHenry County Sheriff's Department could take a PR lesson from the little Round Lake Park (Ill.) Police Department. There, the chief was open, transparent, friendly, took questions, and made no deal whatsoever of my attendance at a press conference, where he announced that the body of a woman missing for more than a week had been found.

If you watched the video of the press conference on the Northwest Herald website, you had to wonder why Nygren stumbled through the reading of it. Maybe he was airsick from the flight in. To me, it sounded like he was reading from the Northwest Herald article. A lawman with 40 years' experience should have been able to just stand there and speak about it!