IROQUOIS COUNTY CORRUPTION SUCCESSFULLY ROOTED OUT

The new Iroquois County Health Department began its operations July 1 as its own single-county department for the first time since 1980 after the Ford-Iroquois County Health Department shut down June 1 amid allegations of misappropriation of funds, mishandling of contract bids and other illegal behavior.

It all started with an anonymous tip from a whistle-blower.

Kirk Allen, head of the Edgar County Watchdogs (an organization founded in 2011 as an effort to hold government accountable), received a tip about possible wrongdoing by members of the health department. Allen said said he suspects the tip came from a neighbor of a department member. He and his Edgar County Watchdogs partner John Kraft began to investigate, filing Freedom of Information Act requests about the board’s meeting minutes and spending records, but noticed parts were missing.

“When you don’t get the full FOIA request, you know there’s a problem,” Allen said.

When the Iroquois County State’s Attorney ordered the health department to turn over the requested documents in full, Allen said he and Kraft began to understand the extent of the trouble.

“They were spending money on things they aren’t supposed to,” Allen said.

According to Allen, the documents they obtained showed the Ford-Iroquois County Public Health Department was spending taxpayer money on purchases such as jewelry, flowers and meals. Meeting minutes showed meetings that were supposed to be held in public buildings were taking place in restaurants, plus other issues.

Two years after a 2008 flood, the county applied for and received a $4.2 million federal flood grant, more than $1 million of which went to health department employees’ own houses.

According to Allen, FOIA and Public Information Officer for the health department Julie Clark awarded a bid to install solar panels to her husband’s company two days before the bid was posted in the newspaper (which should have been done before the contract was made, according to state law).

Iroquois County Board Chairman Rodney Copas also began hearing “coffee shop talk” that concerned him. The talk turned out to be true—Ford-Iroquois County Public Health Department Administrator Doug Corbett took Illinois taxpayer money to set up a home healthcare business in Indiana.

Copas said the county board never was informed of Corbett’s plans (which Allen said are illegal anyway), but that Corbett said he planned to make money in home health care in Indiana and bring it back to Illinois.

“That was his take on it,” Copas said. But instead of making money for Illinois, the project actually lost $1.5 million over five years in a line of work that Copas said is a “profitable business for most places.”

The board was also taking federal money unduly, according to Copas.

“One of the greatest scams we found they were pulling was they got (federal) grants for Ford-Iroquois County Public Health Department…and their retirement was being billed to the grants,” he said. They’d then turn around and also bill the county’s Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, meaning they received double the money and pocketed the extra, a process which went on for 20 years and cost the county millions of dollars, according to Copas. He said they were able to reimburse the IMRF for some of the lost funds.

On top of these serious issues, a statement by Iroquois County State’s Attorney James Devine and Ford County State’s Attorney Matthew Fitton said they also found that the department made billing errors, operated on “a budget that was not representative of how monies would actually be spent or how programs would operate” and contributed to an “apparent hostile work environment” in which employees were confused about their duties.

As the allegations continued to surface and the Edgar County Watchdogs passed their info to the Iroquois County State’s Attorney, Allen said department employees began to resign “one by one.” The Iroquois County Board shut down the home health arm of the health department in October 2013. Copas removed Clark from the board and appointed himself.

Allen said federal prosecutors plan to look into the double-billing of government grants and the county’s IMRF because the incidents involved potential misuse of federal money, but both Allen and Copas expressed disappointment that it seems that neither Devine nor Fitton plan to prosecute Clark, Corbett or other health department employees.

For their efforts to shine a light on and shut down the possibly illegal behavior, Copas, Allen and Kraft received the For the Good of Illinois award from Andrew Andrzejewski (whom Copas also credits with helping expose the corruption) in June.

“He saved more money and did more for the county than any other public official I’ve ever run into. He went above and beyond. There are a few good ones out there,” Allen said of Copas.

After the breakup of the Ford-Iroquois County Health Department, Copas said Iroquois County’s health department will operate on their own from now on. The home health section of the department has been contracted out to Iroquois Memorial Hospital, where Copas said there was no interruption of service and has even taken on new patients.

Copas, whose term is up in November, said he worries for young people and the state of government they’ll be left with if citizens and leaders don’t bridge the gap between them.

“We’ll have a board meeting, we’re lucky if one resident shows up,” he said, though he does see some young people who “get it.”

“Our only hope is to get some more of those guys,” he said.

Copas said that before he leaves office in November he hopes to implement a plan to stream county board meetings online as a way to bring residents into the fold of government and hopefully prevent environments where politicians feel like they can get away with corruption, but he said he thinks it only gets worse the higher up in government one looks.

“When you can do the things that they’ve done at this small place, I just can’t fathom what goes on at the state level,” he said.

This story was first brought to our attention by Reboot Illinois Facebook commenter Daniel Rayman.