‘At your expense’ : Amid calls for transparency, Thornton Township officials detail strains created by Henyard tenure
Residents called for a financial audit of the township’s finances and more transparency. Amid a public records backlog, the township’s attorney said the FOIA process is slow but steady in providing residents information due to a lack of a centralized place for information.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service are investigating Thornton Township’s finances after its last two financial audits failed to come back “clean,” according to a township attorney.
That’s what township attorney Steven Laduzinsky reminded the audience on Aug. 19 where resident demands for a forensic audit dogged the seemingly noncommittal Harris administration.
But Laduzinsky stressed the severity of the township’s financial mess stemmed from former supervisor Tiffany Henyard’s administration.
“Over the last four years, what type of legal mess do you think was created here? How many lawsuits are pending? How many insurance coverage issues are there? All at your expense,” Laduzinsky said. “This has to be cleaned up, and the township is doing whatever is possible to address these.”
Laduzinsky’s comments come as the Harris administration faces a barrage of questions regarding its transparency in operations, including Thornton Township Supervisor Napoleon Harris’ six-figure salary.
Henyard enjoyed the salary of her predecessor Frank Zuccarelli after she was appointed to the seat following his death. The township code was then modified such that first-time supervisors make $57,000 annually. But Harris used his role as a state senator to help ensure he would inherit a salary of over $200,000 from his predecessor.
Township clerk and Freedom of Information Act officer Casey Nesbit addressed social media complaints about its public records process. Nesbit said there are a lot of requests from the previous administration and the new staff hasn’t been fully trained on how to respond. That, coupled with lack of training, is delaying the processing time for requests still coming in.
“Right now, we’re still using the attorneys to review everything because we really haven’t had a chance to sit down and go through a training so that we can redact and handle everything on our own,” Nesbit said.
With legal assistance, each request costs taxpayers $3,000 to $5,000 dollars in attorney fees to gather information to answer such public records requests, according to Laduzinsky’s estimate.
The township is working on a centralized way of keeping publicly-accessible records to speed up its FOIA responses.
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