It’s time to catch up on and dispense with a number of previous stories, so let’s get to it!
The Treasurer didn’t shove anyone
First, I want to thank Kane County Director of Human Resources Jamie Lobrillo for quickly responding to my video FOIA request so I could clear this one up. I wish the FOIA process was always this easy.
Having repeatedly reviewed said video of the purported physical contact between Treasurer Chris Lauzen and recently departed 17-year Director of Financial Operations Carrollyn Brady, I can say with certainty there was no “push” or “shove” as a number of sources alleged.
The video itself was generally inconclusive because there was no sound, it was taken from a top-down perspective that made it difficult to see faces, and that particular system takes a shot every two or three seconds leading to a rather bumpy stream. But in this case it’s what you don’t see that matters, and there was clearly nothing beyond the most benign physical contact.
All you really see is Lauzen and Brady walking back and forth through the hallway, and just before the video ends, it appears that Lauzen put his hand on Brady’s lower back to guide her into his office. Since no one’s denied that contact was made, it’s all pretty cut and dried. Like I said in last week’s column, if there was anything more than minor contact, Brady wouldn’t have settled for a paltry $46,000 severance package.
But as minor as the contact was, it did bother Brady enough for it to feature prominently in her attorney’s letter to Lobrillo.
The vast irony here is, had Lauzen simply sent me the tape that’s exactly what I would’ve written last Friday. But no! Because of his increasingly obsessive need to control everyone and everything around him, Lauzen put a series of ridiculous preconditions on releasing the video which I obtained from human resources without any strings attached.
And I can’t tell you how difficult it was, but despite my limited intellect, I still somehow managed to come to the correct conclusion all by myself! Meanwhile, my original contentions stand that:
- Lauzen should NEVER have attacked Brady – or any other treasurer employee – on the campaign trail.
- Attacking her has made it much more difficult for him successfully to run that office and it put a real damper on office morale.
- It’s bad form to get into a public argument with any staffer.
- Even if you’re well-intentioned, it’s never OK to touch an employee and that’s particularly true of a female employee.
- When this kind of thing isn’t proactively addressed and it gets out – and it always gets out – the public always assumes it’s at least twice as bad as it really was.
For all those reasons and his strange reaction to my inquiries, I’ll stand by my call for the Treasurer to step down in favor of someone who can actually handle the job. But for the record, there was no push or shove.
Those Campton Hills board meeting speakers were dead wrong!
Is it too much to ask that you spend ten minutes praying to St. Google BEFORE you stand up and make a fool of yourself at a village board meeting?
Apparently, it is, because the two “gentlemen” who spoke at trustee Tim Morgan’s first official board meeting last Tuesday were dead wrong when they contended that the village president and board should bar Morgan from serving.
Unlike it is in DeSantisland where the legislature enacts BS laws that allow the governor to replace an elected official at the slightest whim, Illinois has no such mechanism for a local board or council to remove a fellow member. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if that kind of statute existed. Democratic majority boards would vote their GOP counterparts off, and vice versa, completely subverting the will of the electorate.
The only person who can remove Morgan from the Campton Hills Village Board is a judge after presiding over the appropriate due process.
So publicly asking the CH board to ban Morgan belies a vast ignorance of the local governing process and I’d advise our two speakers to refrain from any future attempts to open their mouths and remove all doubt.
Worse yet, one of the commentor’s sons has managed to rack up a DUI, two felonies, and ten criminal misdemeanors. As I explained to Tim, it’s every American’s inalienable right to stand up in public and make a complete hypocritical fool of themselves. God bless America!
Please cancel your subscription to any Shaw Media publication
Just when I think Brenda Schory, the Kane County Chronicle, and Shaw Media can’t possibly sink any lower, they do. And when you consider past behavior, the bar’s set really high, too.
They somehow decided it was appropriate to use former circuit clerk Tom Hartwell’s county jail mugshots in their report on his recent suicide. Yes! You read that right. They used mugshots on what was essentially an elected official’s obituary.
Not only was it beyond disrespectful to do to someone who hadn’t been convicted of anything, but posting those shots on any report is nothing more than a conviction in the press. There were plenty of other Hartwell photos out there, too.
But what do you expect from a “reporter” and publisher who have all the morals of a rutting pig. C’mon, the Kane County Chronicle is a “publication” that firmly believes that copying police reports verbatim is creating “content.”
This is typical Brenda “I’ll do anything for two extra hits” Schory, too. The Daily Herald fired her for good reason, but leave it to the morally bankrupt Shaw Media to pick her up.
These are the mugshots of the major culprits involved here:
All I can say is, when it’s time for these poor excuses for men to meet their Christian God, it won’t go very well for them. If you’re one of the people who still subscribes to a worthless Shaw Media’s publication, please send them a message by cancelling it now. I promise you won’t regret it.
Authors note:
The Chronicle did replace the mugshots with a much more reasonable Hartwell photograph sometime this week. I’d like to think it was conscience pangs that led to this shift, but when you have no conscience to begin with, that can’t be the case. I’m sure Tom’s brother Todd called Shaw Media and read them the riot act.
Taking them down was the right thing to do, but it doesn’t begin to mitigate the damage from putting them up in the first place.