Proposed draft — not law
PROPOSED draft language under legal review — not enacted law, not a filed bill — Illinois only.
The Permanent Record
Three-year retention, and the ability to reconstruct any moment at any facility.
In plain language
When something goes wrong at a pool — an illness cluster, an injury, a dispute over what happened — the record should be able to answer three questions for the moment it happened: what was the water chemistry, how many people were in the water, and how many trained staff were on duty?
PWO's §11.4 makes that a legal property of the data plane. An approved monitoring service must retain both the device readings and the derived video-safety counts for a period the Department prescribes by rule — and never less than 3 years. Retention alone is not enough: the data must be kept in a form that lets the Department reconstruct, for any point in time in that window, the water quality, the bather load, and the staffing then in effect at a facility, for incident investigation and compliance review.
The section also resolves a real tension in the base draft: §3.27 forbids retaining video imagery, while an investigation needs the counts derived from it. §11.4 states plainly that retained numeric data is not video imagery and is not subject to §3.27's imagery-retention limit — the counts survive, the footage does not.
What the July 2026 draft already covers
The base draft requires an approved monitoring service to store data for a retention period the Department prescribes (§11.2), but it sets no statutory floor, says nothing about reconstruction, and leaves open whether derived counts fall under the imagery-retention limit.
What Pure Water Ops adds
Section 11.4 is a PWO addition in full: the 3-year minimum retention floor, the point-in-time reconstruction requirement across water quality, bather load, and staffing, and the express rule that derived counts are not imagery.
“Such data shall be retained in a manner that permits the Department to reconstruct, for any point in time within the retention period, the water quality readings, the bather load, and the number of safety personnel on duty then in effect at a swimming facility, for purposes of incident investigation and compliance review.”
What it means
For operators
Retention is the approved monitoring service's statutory duty — not a filing cabinet at the facility. For an operator running things right, the record is standing evidence of it.
For regulators
Incident investigation moves from paper logs and recollection to minute-level reconstruction of the conditions at the facility.
For the public
Accountability after the fact: what happened at a pool can be established from retained data rather than from whoever remembers.