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…
Category: City Watch
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…
Attorney General determines NIU Foundation must respond to Freedom of Information Act requests
The determination resolves at least three requests for review of NIU Foundation’s refusals to release information on payments to vendors. It followed an examination of the relationship between NIU and NIU Foundation. Hover over the top of the PDF to enlarge it and turn pages. NIU has sometimes used NIU Foundation to hide purchases and/or…
‘There was no felonious activity’
The headline is a quote from City of DeKalb’s latest budget meeting, a joint meeting of city council with the Finance Advisory Committee held last week. Alderman Carolyn Morris asked about following up on findings from the TIF forensic assessment . The city manager and the FAC chair responded that no laws were broken, no…
DeKalb city council voted to allow me to participate remotely in order to exclude you
As DeKalb’s city clerk, I’ve been participating in council meetings via teleconferencing since April. Then, during the July 13 committee-of-the-whole meeting, the city council, somewhat bizarrely, took a vote to allow me to teleconference. This post will explain why. Here’s the clip of part of the mayor’s introduction to the topic. (The first 4-1/2 minutes…
How red do the flags have to be?
The DeKalb city council recently received and filed its fiscal 2019 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) along with the auditor’s letters and communications to council and management. Although the audit was problematic, the council did not talk about the issues, so we will do it here. First, to summarize: The auditor detected material misstatements in…
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…