DeKalb Park District put out a Request for Proposals for a new IT contract. Eight firms applied. Of these, staff whittled down the list to three finalists: CMJ IT Solutions of Sycamore, Noventech of Lombard, and Sundog IT of DeKalb. The park board will probably be making a decision tomorrow. I’ve read the three proposals…
Author: Lynn Fazekas
Elmhurst Hooplah leads to new “Right to Garden” state law
The Illinois General Assembly has passed and sent the Garden Act, aka “Right to Garden Law,” to the governor for signing. I first wrote about this situation in 2018. Hooplah started when Nicole Virgil and her family decided to take their raised-bed organic gardening to the next level by growing as close to year-round as…
The “T” word
He said it. I knew he would. It was only a matter of time. New mayor Cohen Barnes called the DeKalb city council a “team” during the last council meeting. It’s horrifying.
DeKalb might be doing some juggling with fire department budget
Below is the year-to-date expenditure report for fire operations for December 2020. Two things are startling about it. First you see that overtime expenses reached $1.1 million for the year, which exceeds the budget for o.t. by $688,000. Then see how DeKalb failed to make a final pension contribution of $708,000 on time, which was…
DeKalb County Clerk’s Office has released the final election counts
These are the numbers for the City of DeKalb races. Link to the posting in the City Barbs Facebook Group
How to “lose” TIF documents
***UPDATE 4/8/2021: After writing the original post, I decided to phone the Public Access Counselor (PAC) of the Attorney General’s Office to discuss possible Open Meetings Act implications of the incident described in it. Following the discussion, I filed a Request for Review and today I was notified that the PAC has accepted the request.…
Who gets my vote for mayor and why
Mayor Jerry Smith stood by while other city officials threatened, without cause, the imminent eviction of residents from their homes above Lord Stanley’s. Mayor Jerry Smith stood by as his city manager heaped insults and threats upon me and defamed me during council meetings. Mayor Jerry Smith has just endorsed Cohen Barnes for mayor. How…
DeKalb’s Finance Division is a story of loss and low priority
DeKalb’s city council has so far failed to face the troubling results of its last annual audit. This has led to a failure to recognize the connections between those results and the turnover and staff reductions in Finance Division, including the loss of a full-time finance director. And the squeeze is still on for this…
City of DeKalb made the budget even harder to follow for 2021
Let’s say you are looking at the Fire Pension Fund in the 2021 budget. You can see the annual employer’s contribution is approaching $4.3 million. Next, you decide to look at the Fire Department budget to get a feel for how much of the total FD budget is comprised of pension contributions. The Fire budget…
Peter, Flynn, and the united front
This is my (intentionally stark) account of destruction wrought decades ago by a toxic person in a workplace. Names are changed. =1= Suddenly we couldn’t count on Peter getting out of bed in the morning. He denied he was sick and said he just didn’t feel like going to work. After a couple weeks of…