During a special meeting of the city council yesterday, I alleged that City of DeKalb had not given sufficient notice of the meeting, in that DeKalb did not explicitly name a location for it. The city maintains that it gave sufficient notice because the agenda was printed on city letterhead, which includes the address of…
IRS revoked 501(c)3 status from DeKalb Firefighters Historical Foundation 2+ years ago
As part of staff reports during Monday’s regular city council meeting, the mayor read a statement from Todd Stoffa, a captain with the fire department who is also president of the DeKalb Firefighters Historical Foundation. On behalf of DeKalb Firefighters Historical Foundation, I would like to express my sincere apologies for the mishap that led…
Why did DeKalb change its employee numbers going back 10 years?
I was looking up city budgets yesterday and thought that information on numbers of employees would help provide more context for what I was seeing. My resource for this is the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), not the CAFR itself, but a report appended near the end of the document that’s called “Full-Time Equivalent Employees,”…
Freedom of Speech starts at home
It’s not just DeKalb’s mayor who’s having trouble with the Open Meetings Act lately. The Edgar County Watchdogs report that the president of the Village of Wheeling recently used police officers to stop a citizen who wanted to address public comments to one particular public official instead of the whole board. The focus of this…
Mayor Jerry Smith is mischaracterizing my comments
At the end of the August 28 city council meeting, DeKalb mayor Jerry Smith pushed back against public criticism of staff members, threatening to cut comments off with his gavel if he feels “personal attacks are being made.” There are three of us who have used the forum of public meetings to criticize the city’s…
Mayor Smith runs from Freedom of Information right smack into the First Amendment
I went to a special city council meeting last night, where I noted two odd occurrences. First off, Aaron Stevens attended. Stevens is DeKalb’s Freedom of Information Act officer, but there was nothing on the agenda about FOIA. The second weird thing was the attentiveness of council members. Gone were the usual tablet-tapping movements and…
What we need in DeKalb is a new political party
Last year I looked into the type of municipal elections we have here in City of DeKalb, and learned that we technically have partisan elections, though we do not actually exercise the right to have parties and primaries. The idea’s been stuck in the back of my mind ever since. Now I’ve written about it,…
Open letter to NIU’s Board of Trustees regarding Dr. Baker’s severance package
***This letter from DeKalb resident and NIU faculty member Michael Haji-Sheikh references a Washington Post article by Jon Marcus, “Golden parachutes for presidents of public colleges with thin budgets.” ~yinn Dear Board of Trustees, As a citizen of Illinois, I have become aware of another embarrassing news article. Unfortunately, the severance of Dr. Baker (and…
Task force a potential bright spot for Annie Glidden North revitalization
It’s no secret that my main concern for the Annie Glidden North revitalization effort is the possibility that City of DeKalb and NIU are preparing to push a secret agenda to the detriment of public input and outcomes. As I exhaustively outlined for you earlier, email discussions of private planning, from the “DeKalb 2020 Prospectus”…
Fourth Warders on/near South Seventh Street: Cell phone tower application is back
In case this is new to you, we’ll start with a recap. From a post published April 2015: [DeKalb Planning & Zoning Commission] has discussed a request made by Central States Tower (CST) for a permit to place a Verizon cell tower/antenna at 1300 South 7th Street even though CST did not follow procedures required…