City of Chicago denies NBC 5 Investigates' request for additional records showing how $57 million was spent on staffing migrant shelters

City agency says burden of redacting records “outweighs public interest in the information”

Since August of last year, city finance records show a Kansas-based company, Favorite Healthcare Staffing, has billed the city of Chicago for more than $57 million.

What’s not clear is exactly how those dollars were spent.

Favorite Healthcare Staffing has not responded to repeated requests for comment from NBC 5 Investigates. The company has a contract with the city to provide staffing in shelters that help house more than 14,000 migrants who now call Chicago home.

The city of Chicago’s finance department has denied NBC 5 Investigates’ Freedom of Information Act request for copies of a year’s worth of invoices.

In its denial letter, the city said the request was “unduly burdensome” and that with 498 payment vouchers that would require redactions, it would pose an “immense burden on the department’s time.”

The burden, the city’s letter says, “outweighs the public interest in the information.”

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.

“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 42^nd ward.

Reilly is among a growing chorus of city leaders raising concerns about transparency with city spending.

Last week, two other aldermen raised concerns in interviews with NBC 5 Investigates about the city’s spending on migrants following Thursday’s council meeting.

Reilly’s ward includes the Inn of Chicago, one of the longest serving migrant shelters that city records show now hosts more than 1,500 people.

“The city council has a role in appropriating monies like this – for programs like this – and the fact that we’ve all been left in the dark about the costs per hour for the staff for these facilities I think is insane,” said Alderman Brendan Reilly.

When we asked Mayor Brandon Johnson last week about the perceived lack of transparency, he said this:

“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.

Johnson went on to state that is administration “is transparent.”

Questions about the city’s spending on migrant care comes as the Johnson administration revealed a projected $538 million budget deficit last week – with more than $200 million attributed to the growing migrant crisis.

Just last week, the city inked a $29 million deal with GardaWorld, which is contracted to build temporary housing in yurt-like structures with cots for migrants - a move aimed at getting people out of the city’s police stations, which continue to serve as temporary shelters for new arrivals.

In an email to NBC 5 Investigates, a spokesman for Mayor Johnson said the locations of the so-called tent cities has not been determined. His email did not explain separate questions we posed about the city’s denial of spending records.

NBC 5 Investigates has agreed to narrow our request with the city's finance department in the hopes of receiving additional copies of invoices.