Eliminating Zoom option for city meetings is a terribly backwards thing to do

The Daily Chronicle reports that City of DeKalb is eliminating the remote public participation option for meetings because Illinois is entering Phase 4 of its reopening.

First victim is Human Relations Commission, which during its last meeting enjoyed remote participation via the Zoom application by nearly 90 people. Since the meeting tonight also will not be televised, your only option for real-time participation is to show up in person for an historic discussion of recommendations for better police-community relations.

This is a completely backwards move. Reasons:

— Safety. I have not watched one city meeting in which board members and city staff have successfully practiced COVID-19 precautions. At times I’ve seen no masks, masks pulled down under noses and chins, and failures of social distancing — even people shaking hands. During the last TIF Joint Review Board meeting, members of the public who attended in person had to pass within a couple feet of board members to make their comments.

Another safety issue right now is the weather. Some people have medical issues that prevent them from venturing outdoors in the extreme heat. Pulling Zoom at this point seems ableist.

— Accommodation. The Open Meetings Act states that public meetings must be held at times and in places convenient to the public. Remote public participation is entirely consistent with the spirit of the Act, and turnout when Zoom is used demonstrates there is demand for this option.

— Progress. There is no good reason not to make remote public participation part of the repertoire for conducting meetings in a modern city.

Staff recently made a serious error on the wrong side of the Open Meetings Act by offering a remote participation option for members of the TIF Joint Review Board while barring the general public from the same option; the State’s Attorney’s Office had to step in to correct it. Better decisions could be made if council would stop ceding its authority in these matters to staff, who do not have the same motivation to take the side of the public. Conducting meetings is policy, and policy rightfully belongs with our elected representatives.

Charging the Water Fund for salaries in other departments is a masterpiece of nontransparency

*Note: “Departments” as used in this article should be read as shorthand for “departments, divisions, and offices.”*

Take a look at this budget from DeKalb’s Finance Division:

FY2020-Finance-adopted-budget

Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, it’s not. It does not show all the wages the Finance employees get paid. This is a budget that accounts only for the wages coming from the General Fund (the city’s chief operating fund). Finance staff also get paid portions of their wages from the Water Fund.

Total full- and part-time wages this year for Finance people are projected to come to $157,000 more than this Finance budget shows. Likewise, the Water Fund provides part of the compensation for the city manager’s office, Building & Code, HR, IT — even the city council.

Continue reading Charging the Water Fund for salaries in other departments is a masterpiece of nontransparency

TIF forensic assessment tells us how DeKalb operates

The promised forensic audit report (now being called a forensic assessment for some reason) of City of DeKalb’s tax increment financing funds has been released by the DeKalb County State’s Attorney’s Office.

The report details miscalculations, missing documents, and other failures of due diligence occurring across the 10-year period examined.

Much of the fireworks over TIF began when members of the Joint Review Board that oversees it, particularly our school district, began questioning the size of transfers from TIF funds to the General Fund, the city’s chief operating fund, to cover administrative costs.

The report includes the document below, which accounts for 2018’s originally intended $791,744 transfer amount. You can decide for yourself whether all these people were “administering” TIF. DeKalb ultimately settled on $160,000 in transfers for 2018, and for this year has budgeted $15,000, so apparently even the city no longer thinks so.

tif-transfer-to-GF-fy18-2

The good news is the transfers began shrinking in the sunshine. The bad news is the assessment tells you just about everything you need to know about how DeKalb operates, always. If you look at the dates of missing invoices and proofs of service, for example, you see that it’s not just one or two years where missing documents are a problem; it’s spread across the entire 10-year scope of the assessment. It’s true today, too — I can confirm from my “look behind” information requests that documentation related to licensing comes up missing with some regularity.

What the TIF transfers did were to enable the city to retain more staff than it otherwise could have. In the fiscal 2008 budget the transfers came to $350,000 and the stated goal was to reduce them to zero by 2013. This didn’t happen because the Great Recession happened. In 2010, the city was in a hole and the TIF transfers topped $1 million. In target year 2013, transfers helped fuel a nascent hiring spree that ended with another hole in 2018.

The transfers are virtually down to nothing now, but there’s still a chart similar to the TIF transfer chart and it’s also for deciding how much of employees’ wages should come from another city fund — the Water Fund. The assistant city manager recently confirmed for me that about $370,000 is charged to Water to pay employees who work in other city departments/divisions/offices.

More later.

There is no clerk

Cat’s out of the bag. I was going to save this discussion for June, when DeKalb city council takes up the matter of compensation for the next elected terms of offices. Then at last night’s council meeting, following disposal of ordinances, the mayor announced I was going to go to city hall the next day to sign off on the Ventus Project paperwork.

The last time I signed off on ordinances, it was early November, 2019. So I have questions, and I asked them during the “reports and announcements” portion of the meeting.

Here is a partial transcript of the exchange. (I’ll also post a link to the recording.)

Fazekas: The second thing is about your request that I come to city hall to sign off on the Ventus paperwork. I am isolating at this point and for good reason. However, I have some questions. I would like the public to know that I have not signed any ordinances, or resolutions, or contracts, since early November. I have not signed any licenses since mid-December. This is all the natural consequences of the ordinances that were passed in October having to do with the clerk’s position. Over the past few months I’ve seen, more and more, taking from my role, even while I was maintaining my office hours.

Continue reading There is no clerk

Municipal theft protections are not ‘set it and forget it’ and theft can happen here

When it comes to theft of public money in Illinois, Rita Crundwell probably comes to mind for most folks in DeKalb. At one time, however, the name was Orville Enoch Hodge. Hodge, as Illinois auditor of public accounts, stole $6 million in 1950s dollars, the equivalent of about $57 million today – and he accomplished this in a mere four years on the job.

Hodge was the reason for abolishing the office of state auditor and establishing the separate offices of Illinois comptroller and treasurer we have today. When these state-level offices come up for re-election now, we invariably hear calls for consolidating the two to save money, but I’ll bet we wouldn’t if we could manage to remember how much Hodge cost us.

Crundwell, like Hodge, acted as both treasurer and controller of the City of Dixon, meaning she controlled both the money coming in and the money going out. But jackpot-sized hauls aside, municipal theft is common, according to the Illinois Municipal League (IML). IML laid out a series of articles about prevention of municipal theft in the October 2019 volume of its Review Magazine, and about treasurer and controller said, “Separating those positions is a simple and effective control, requiring the numbers to match on both sides of the equation.”

Continue reading Municipal theft protections are not ‘set it and forget it’ and theft can happen here

Taking away the city clerk’s role in checks and balances

Jumping off my last post and recent discussion of it, I want to share a little more of the context in which I currently attempt to function as city clerk in DeKalb.

This time last year, I signed and sealed some contracts and all plats, ordinances, resolutions, and licenses. Hundreds of documents crossed my desk in my first months as DeKalb city clerk. But beginning last spring, following a decision to move a large portion of license processing from the finance division to the city manager’s office, others began signing licenses without my knowledge. These incidents snowballed after the request for my resignation last July, and with the city council’s October 14 passage of amendments to the clerk’s ordinances, the flow of documents slowed, then dried up altogether before the end of 2019.

Except for meeting minutes, I haven’t signed a thing since mid-December.

Continue reading Taking away the city clerk’s role in checks and balances

As DeKalb city clerk, I feel like a punching bag

***Update: Find discussion and comments in our Facebook group .***

When I read the other day the Daily Chronicle is still calling it a “rift” in describing what’s going on between the city manager’s office and me as city clerk, I realized I have to say more than I have before. It’s no longer a “rift,” if it ever was — that would imply equality of treatment. The relationship is more like I’m a punching bag for the city manager’s office.

To help illustrate, here are two of the latest email exchanges between the city manager and me. (I will also post copies of the actual emails at the end of this post.) Mind you, my emails addressed the city council only. I cc’d the city manager as a courtesy.

My message to the city council, December 6, 2019:

Dear Mayor Smith et al,

As some of you are already aware, in September I agreed to take on the process of preparing for the semi-annual review of executive session meeting minutes approval and release recommendations.

Having begun the process this week, I have discovered errors in the indexes that have resulted in executive session meeting minutes being released to the public that were not approved for release by council.

I have two requests to make to address these issues:

1. To remove, as soon as possible, published executive session meeting minutes from the City’s website until these errors can be corrected.

2. To amend the Council regular meeting agenda for December 9 by adding an executive session to discuss these minutes as provided for in 5 ILCS 120/2(c)(21).

Regards,
Lynn Fazekas | City Clerk

City manager’s reply, December 6, 2019:

Good afternoon,

As tiring and distracting as the City Clerk’s fabrications and thinly-veiled charges against Ruth Scott may be, they are–more importantly—creating the basis for an employee harassment charge which will be substantial and embarrassing to the City at a time when we are within sight of some transformational growth. As your chief administrative officer and development director, I ask that we discuss these unfounded allegations in executive session where the truth can be dispassionately shared, and then get back to what the public has asked us to do.

As an historian and a keen observer of the American political scene since the early 1970s, I have been witness to many national public figures who have sadly appealed to base emotions by plucking some imagined dark thread of corruption and laying it on the shoulders of persons whose dedication is a constant reminder of their own inadequacies. Before January 1, I thought I had seen everything, and I also thought I would never see, on a local level, the conspiratorial thinking that animates the City Clerk. As there seems to be no relief from her presence until the spring of 2021, I trust that we will collectively find ways to hold her to the duties that the Council approved on October 14, and also hold her to what is commonly understood as professional decency and discretion.

In the weeks and months ahead, I hope we can focus on the main thing.

Best,
Bill

Continue reading As DeKalb city clerk, I feel like a punching bag

DeKalb Park District property transfer could use another look

DeKalb Park District (DPD) passed a resolution last summer to convey park property to City of DeKalb for its new city hall. The transfer has since occurred under an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) between the two.

City of DeKalb paid DPD a dollar for the property known as the Nehring building. Possibly illegally by ignoring the Park District Code of the Illinois Compiled Statutes. Definitely unfairly as we bear witness, for example, to DPD’s financial struggles to keep its golf courses open. 

DPD acknowledges it must go to referendum to sell a golf course – there’s the Park District Code for you – but somehow a virtual freebie to the city under IGA is fine? What the two parties did was cite other authorities for the conveyance, the Local Government Property Transfer Act and the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act. Here’s what the Property Transfer Act says:

If such real estate shall be held by the transferor municipality without restriction, the said municipality shall have power to grant or convey such real estate or any portion thereof to the transferee municipality upon such terms as may be agreed upon by the corporate authorities of both municipalities…

“If…without restriction…” So, isn’t the next step to check the statutes that apply to the transferor to see what restrictions it might have? City of DeKalb might not have any restrictions, but the city is not the transferor. DPD is, and Article 10 of the Park District Code has a lot to say about it. Continue reading DeKalb Park District property transfer could use another look

Pardon the interruption…

I’m going to begin this blog post by pointing out that on the City Barbs group we don’t adhere to strict standards of civility. Instead, we try to permit heated moments in which citizens may vent their frustration at public officials. If a citizen is justifiably aggrieved, expressing their anger how they see fit helps to communicate just how abhorrent the situation has become.

I find myself in this quasi-media role as a political forum moderator and blogger with a dilemma about what to do when a public official begins to write abrasive posts in response to constituents. You can ordinarily expect them to act professionally. However, serving in office can be a thankless job, especially in high conflict communities where listening to every lamentation and ill-informed opinion can be grating on one’s patience, and occasionally there are instances when they lose their temper. I have wondered if perhaps those who volunteer to do it deserve a little clemency every once in a while.

On Monday, February 11th, the City Council discussed an ordinance to amend the rules for public comment. Those who regularly participate know that there is public participation at the beginning for speaking about anything that is not on the agenda, and then there’s also discussion reserved before each agenda item. This has often led to members of the public waiting hours through long meetings before having any opportunity to speak to their item of interest. The ordinance presented would move all public comment to the beginning except for people who “have a unique standing relative to a given item.” The trade-off to this is that if someone wanted to speak to an item on the agenda and also some other matter not germane to anything on the agenda, it would diminish the total time they would be afforded.

Now, I want to draw attention to Alderman Fagan’s remarks.

Continue reading Pardon the interruption…