Skokie Ethics Commission Promises To Start Following Open Meetings Act

SKOKIE, IL — After village staff acknowledged that the Skokie Ethics Commission violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act by failing to hold public meetings, commissioners are set to meet Thursday in their first properly conducted meeting on record.

State law requires public bodies to follow certain rules when conducting meetings. Village boards or councils — as well as any boards, committees or commissions they create — must post agendas prior to meetings, allow comments from members of the public in open session and post minutes summarizing what happened.

But, in response to a public records request, village officials admitted that they have no records of the ethics commission ever holding a meeting in accordance with the Open Meetings Act, or OMA.

Instead, records show two members of the commission last year met in private and decided to toss out an ethics complaint alleging Mayor George Van Dusen and Corporation Counsel Mike Lorge violated the village's ethics code.

The controversy over the commission's handling of complaints began nearly two years ago following the April 2021 village board elections.

First Complaint

At the time, recently elected Village Trustee James Johnson filed an ethics complaint accusing members of the village's law department of attempting to bribe him by offering an appointment to the volunteer Environmental Sustainability Commission — but only if he agreed not to challenge candidates slated by the historically dominant Skokie Caucus Party in the elections.

Johnson ran as an independent and won a seat on the village board anyway, becoming the first non-Caucus Party village trustee in decades — in large part because the party withdrew its support from one of its slated candidates amid controversy over his past social media posts.

While a member of the ethics commission notified Johnson that it met May 3, 2021, and reviewed his complaint without finding sufficient probable cause to believe Lorge violated the code, the commission did so without ever convening a public meeting in open session as required by the OMA.

"The Ethics Commission meets as needed, and I'm not sure when the last meeting was convened," Ann Tennes, the village's marketing and communications director, told Skokie Patch on May 11, 2021 — indicating the commission's meetings were so secret that even the village's chief spokesperson was unaware of them.

Lorge, the chief village attorney, declined to respond to Patch's questions about the commission at the time.

Second Complaint

Last June, as supporters of voter-initiated electoral reform referendums sought to challenge the dominance of the Caucus Party by placing binding questions on November's ballot, the mayor proposed a trio of non-binding referendums that would have blocked them.

First elected to the village board in 1984, Van Dusen has spent the past 24 years as mayor, but he had never previously sought to place non-binding advisory questions on the ballot. No village trustees publicly supported his move and, facing protests from residents, Van Dusen backed off.

The mayor claimed at the time he had not been motivated by a desire to keep the referendums proposed by the Skokie Alliance for Electoral Reform off the ballot, though he knew they would have that effect. Voters eventually approved all three of the alliance's referendum questions.

In August, Johnson, a vocal backer of the alliance's reform proposals, filed a second ethics complaint about Van Dusen and Lorge, this time about the mayor's abortive trio of proposed non-binding advisory questions.

"When the Mayor, with the assistance of the Village Corporation Counsel's office, attempted to use the Village Board's power of resolution for referendum in order to block a resident campaign from access to the ballot, I believe an ethics violation occurred," Johnson said in his complaint, which cited the prohibition in the village's ethics code about using public office for personal gain or for the benefit of private associations, like political parties.

"The state ethics act prohibits elected officials from intentionally misappropriating the services of public employees, so I don't think it's appropriate for Mayor Van Dusen to involve public employees at the village in a politically motivated attempt to stop a political campaign," Johnson later told Patch.

"Very optimistically," he said, "I had hoped that the second complaint would be more substantive because it was about something far more public."

Six weeks later, Jonathan Minkus, and the chair of the ethics commission, said in a letter that he and fellow commissioner Leonard Matanky had met privately and "thoroughly discussed" the complaint.

Minkus said he and Matanky "both agreed that [Johnson's] complaint failed to establish probable cause that a violation of the State or Village of Skokie ethics ordinance occurred in this case."

There was no agenda, minutes or other available records produced for that meeting, which village staff would later concede had been held in violation of the OMA amid scrutiny from the Illinois Attorney General's Office.

Scrutiny From The State

After learning of the circumstances of the commission's dismissal of Johnson's second complaint, Edgar Pal, a government transparency advocate and resident of Chicago's North Side, filed a request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act for records of ethics commission meetings.

Pal learned the commission "did not prepare a public notice or meeting agenda for its non-public meeting(s)," according to his Nov. 12 request for review by the attorney general's public access counselor, or PAC, which investigates OMA violations.

In a response to the attorney general's office, Minkus, an attorney first appointed to the ethics commission in May 2017, indicated he did not believe the OMA applied to the commission.

"The ordinance manifestly does NOT require the Commission to do any of the things Mr. Johnson claims were violations of the Open Meetings Act," Minkus said, in a Dec. 12 letter to the PAC's deputy bureau chief.

"In fact, parenthetically, the first time I had even the slightest idea that Mr. Johnson believed that we had not complied with the Illinois open meetings law was when I received a call last week from an intern working in the Village Manager's office asking me about complying with the open meetings law," he said, offering to vacate commission actions if the attorney general's office determines it violated state law.

Minkus did not respond to requests for comment.

James McCarthy, Lorge's deputy in the law department and the chair of the Skokie Caucus Party, also arranged to discuss the issue with a representative of the public access counselor, records show.

Then, on Dec. 21, Philip Wasserburg, an administrative intern in the village manager's office, responded to the PAC request for review on behalf of the village.

"Upon completion of [our] investigation regarding [Pal's complaint], we have determined that because the commission failed to initially start the meeting as an open meeting, the meeting was improperly closed by the Commission," Wasserburg said. "Additionally, because the commission did not begin the meeting as an open meeting, no agenda was ever prepared."

Wasserburg said village staff had spoken to ethics commissioners and instructed them that they need to follow state open meetings law.

The next day, Assistant Attorney General Matt Goodman confirmed, in a letter to Pal, that village representatives had pledged to vacate the past ethics commission decision, re-hear Johnson's second complaint and hold all future commission meetings in accordance with state law.

"On November 29, 2022, this office sent a copy of your Request for Review to the Commission and the Village responded by acknowledging that the Commission had not adhered to OMA," Goodman said, "because it failed to post an agenda, start the meeting in open session, and properly close a portion of the meeting to the public."

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Pal, who has prevailed over several public bodies in transparency issues, told Patch that ethics legislation in Illinois is relatively weak.

Local governments and school districts are required to adopt ethics ordinances at least as strong as the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act. And municipalities that have their own ethics boards — like Skokie, Evanston and Chicago — have more than the minimum required by law. But when they conduct meetings, they still must follow state open meetings law.

"This seems to be a pretty straightforward case." Pal told Patch. "Clearly the Ethics Commission thought they could just discuss by themselves. They weren't aware of Open Meetings Act requirements, so they acknowledged it."

Earlier this month, the PAC opened up another investigation of a possible OMA violation in Skokie after Pal alleged the village board improperly entered into closed sessions three times over the past two months to discuss the process of appointing the village attorney.

The ethics commission is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Thursday at Village Hall, this time with a posted agenda and opportunity for public comments.

There is a single item on the agenda: "Review of Ethics Complaint Concerning Potential Violation Involving Mayor Van Dusen and Corporation Counsel Michael Lorge and Determination of Probable Cause to Proceed to Hearing," which is expected to be discussed in closed session in accordance with OMA.

Johnson said his experiences with the commission were "incredibly underwhelming" and suspected something was missing from its process, but he did not realize it was a violation of state law until Pal contacted him in December.

"My issue is not with the Ethics Commission or with any of our commissioners," the trustee explained. "My issue, first and foremost, is with our corporation counsel's office. Both of the ethics complaints I have filed concern political conflicts of interest within our village legal department. That's my concern."