Respect?

It was reported that the topic of conversation at yesterday’s League of Women Voters candidate forum was the issue of respect.  But the question still remains, respect for what?

Ed Ritter is one of three candidates seeking election for Village President.

“I will bring a different style of leadership to the village board,” said Ed Ritter, a current trustee who is running for the village’s top post. “There has been zero cooperation and no chance to work together … the negative attacks have been a way of life for me and the other trustees for the past four years.”

Unfortunately, Ritter has become a party to those things that drove what he calls “negative attacks”, and is now one of 4 candidates for that group.

The “negative attacks” that Ritter is referring to likely concern current Village President, Bill Sarto, and current Trustee, Linda Ramirez Sliwiniski, demanding accountability from the other trustees, including Ritter, for their heinous disregard for laws and ordinances.  Their violations — and even criminal conviction of one trustee — have resulted in some serious consequences for the Village.

Ed Ritter, and fellow Trustee Kay Teeter — also up for re-election — have excused these violations, choosing to side with Trustees Sigwalt and Humpfer, who have engaged in everything from violations of the Illinois Open Meetings Act — when a meeting of a private group included 4 members of the Village’s Audit and Finance Commission discussing matters of Village business — to misappropriation of Village property — when Trustees Humpfer and Sigwalt used conference rooms at a Village fire house free of charge for approximately 1 year to meet with a private group,  using the agenda of upcoming Village Board meetings and information contained in their Trustee packets to strategize on how to interfere with the normal conduct of Village business.

The discovery of the meetings prompted the Village Manager to instruct the Trustees that these meetings could not be held at the Fire Station because they did not represent an appropriate use.  This is something that Trustees seemed to be very aware of given that they had provided misleading information to staff in order to reserve the room for their own personal use.

Additionally, discovery of these meetings prompted a cautionary letter from the Illinois Attorney General’s office.

Pat Schultz, the chairperson of the Carpentersville Improvement Committee and candidate for Trustee, was reported to be a participant at several of these meetings.  It is unknown whether Ritter and Teeter we also present at these meetings, but when the meetings were discovered, Ritter and Teeter were complicit with the offense.

Unfortunately, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seems to have been too busy to look into these very serious issues, despite trying to maintain that she was tough on corruption.  A cornerstone of Madigan’s office is ethics reform, but the Illinois Attorney General has been otherwise silent on the unethical behavior running rampant among these trustees in Carpentersville, a village of more than 36,000 people.  (Contrary to the statements of some, this is not politics, these are serious matters that require serious attention for the protection of the people’s interests.)

This was carried to an extreme when they were complicit in retaining Trustee Paul Humpfer as a member of the Board, after he was convicted by a court of law on four counts of domestic battery of his wife.  Ritter and Teeter did not consider Humpfer’s attack of his wife with a baseball bat to be a serious enough crime to warrant his removal from the Board.  Instead, attacks came against Sarto for seeking Humpfer’s removal.

We find another case here when those charged with preserving justice seemingly failed to do their job.  Normally, even the presence of a weapon in the hands of an attacker brings an automatic felony charge.  But, the Kane County State’s Attorney’s office brought charges that were about as serious as if Humpfer had simply spit in his wife’s face.

And, in addition to all this Kay Teeter and Ed Ritter apparently have files in the Code Enforcement office containing a series of code violations reported on their residences.  Trustee Sigwalt tried to defend them but Community Development Director Cindy McCammack confirms the existence of said files.

Ritter and Teeter claim they will restore respect to the Village Board.  But they have shown on numerous occasions that they respect lawlessness and unethical behavior.  Trustee Sigwalt is backing these trustees because they have apparently been good little soldiers in her seeming disregard for the law (in fact, it was reported that she expressed during the Electoral Board hearings that she didn’t have to follow laws that she didn’t agree with.)

Sigwalt throughout the hearing was questioning the law. […] She at one point actually said, that if I don’t agree with a law I don’t believe that we need to follow it.

I encourage you to visit all the links highlighted in this posting (and follow the links in those postings too) to get a real picture of the serious problems that Ritter, Teeter, Schultz, Sigwalt and Humpfer have created in this Village.  And be sure to go here for Carpentersville Voter Information.

Is this the kind of “respect” that you want from your government?