Mediaboss Marketing

The up-and-coming economic development group Focus Forward Central Illinois has a new board, effective 10 days ago.

You probably never would have known it, though, because once again the group did a bang-up job of avoiding media attention.

No news advisories were sent about the meeting conducted over the phone to name 20 new members to the board. A release was issued a week late, only after we started to ask questions. About the only bow to transparency was that the meeting got tossed onto the FFCI websites calendar.

Because this is a group looking for public funding to bolster private dollars to operate, we asked them, frankly, what gives especially since wed been getting notices of meetings all through September after a summer full of complaints about lack of openness.

We are currently in the process of building our systems so that media requests as received can be accommodated per our commitment to transparency, FFCI communications chief Diana Hall said. I have added (your) request to our files and in the future you should receive information that we also have posted on the website.

Heres why we think Halls claims seem like nonsense:

The group managed to send meeting notifications last month even for some committees while they were also in a state of transition. The notices werent issued by the groups former parent, the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, but instead by the assistant for one of the private-sector people leading this charge.

That person, Caterpillars Jim Baumgartner whom you may remember from his tacit participation in the secret effort to push the water company buyout was one of three people on the interim FFCI board.

In short, theyve proven they can keep the media and public in the loop when they want to.

We understood indeed, we used this space to observe previously that some of the private sector folks were having to learn a whole new way of thinking about operating in sunlight.

Read more:
Word on the Street: Taxpayers shouldn’t fund transparency-averse FFCI