Republican County Board Members announced they moved quickly to take action against embattled administrators.
Ray Wesley, Madison County Republican Chairman and a County Board member from Godfrey was extremely disappointed to learn of the information contained in several search warrant affidavits released to the public last week regarding two high level employees of Madison County Government.
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“While working through the process of understanding the evidence and getting answers to all questions the county board members may have, it is unfortunate that former Regional Superintendent of Schools Bob Daiber chose to intervene in that process and attempt to take that responsibility away from the county board,” said Wesley. “He has called for action to be taken without following all necessary procedures set forth in the county policies and procedures handbook and as such could be setting Madison County up for a potential lawsuit if his call to order is followed.” Wesley further stated that Daiber needs to support the effort to follow established procedures to handle personnel matters legally and without prejudice regarding these serious allegations.
Wesley also a former long-time high school basketball referee and member of the Illinois Basketball Hall of Fame said, “I’m used to people like Bob Daiber - red faced and shaking their fists from the stands telling us what we should do without knowing the rules,” reacting to Daiber’s press release on Monday calling for the immediate termination of Madison County Administrator Doug Hulme, IT Director Rob Dorman and another employee Steve Adler.
Last week nearly 500 pages of documents were unsealed, including affidavits for search warrants pertaining to an investigation of Hulme, Dorman and Adler that was initiated in January of 2018 by special public corruption task force. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul announced in late October that his office was declining to file any charges after a 14 month review of the case. Dorman and Hulme along with their attorneys persisted in requesting that the underlying evidence in the case be made public, which resulted in the release of the information last week.
The documents allege that Hulme and Dorman were given unfettered access to the county’s entire email server. It was alleged that the pair used the email access to spy on political rivals, including members of the judiciary and the public defender’s office, which were protected under state law. The documents also allege that Dorman had made attempts to access the County Auditor’s protected financial software.
“I spent much of the Easter weekend reading the affidavits and trying to understand the case and how best to move forward”, said Bethalto county board member Tom McRae who is a candidate for Circuit Clerk in November. “The Open Meetings Act doesn’t allow widespread discussion of any issue among board members outside a scheduled meeting. After talking with Ray and a few other Republican board members I decided to call County Clerk, Debbie Ming Mendoza, on Saturday afternoon to request that an Executive Session be placed on the agenda for our Wednesday meeting for discussion among the entire County Board”.
County Board member David Michael of Highland, who is a candidate for Auditor, said he found the allegations disturbing. “We have worked incredibly hard as a party to gain public trust and are obligated to thoroughly review the evidence gathered by the task force and take appropriate action regardless of politics”.
After conferring with the States Attorney office over the weekend Wesley was advised that no action could be taken at Wednesday’s regularly scheduled meeting after the executive session for a variety of legal reasons. He was told that a special meeting would need to be called by getting at least 10 signatures from county board members. Wesley spent Monday morning gathering those signatures and filed them with the County Clerk’s office in order to schedule a special meeting of the County Board for Thursday evening.
County board member Mike Walters of Godfrey thought it was odd the way Daiber weighed in on this issue. “As a former County Board member, you’d think Bob would understand the process that we have to go through to take appropriate action. Maybe that’s why the taxpayers were forced to pay out $500,000 to one of his former employees in the Regional Office of Education as part of a sexual discrimination lawsuit. Instead of grandstanding with a press release, we moved quickly behind the scenes to get a process in place to be able to take swift action. Actions speak louder than words.”
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