by Barry Dredze
Village Trustees voted unanimously to censure Trustee Erik Spande immediately following Spande’s expulsion from the regular Village Board meeting on Thursday, May 17.
Trustee Spande independently acted upon calls to release details from closed executive sessions of the Village Board of Trustees regarding the Winfield Police Department and its share of the general fund in the Village budget.
[For Trustee Spande's complete summary of the Winfield Police Evaluation in Executive Session click here]
Passing with a 4-2 vote, the motion stated that “Trustee Erik Spande be removed from this meeting for divulging confidential executive session meeting information and betraying the trust of his colleagues and the citizens that entrusted him to hold this office.”
Spande had requested an executive session during the regular Village Board meeting on Thursday, May 3 specifically for the purpose of reviewing and releasing executive session minutes in which police costs were discussed. His request was ultimately denied. However, ahead of the May 17 Board meeting Trustee Spande publicly released his own summary of the evaluation of police services conducted by the Winfield Board of Trustees over twelve separate closed executive sessions from June 2, 2011 through April 5, 2012.
“This is a moral dilemma,” Spande said, “and in my mind there is only one way to resolve it – full disclosure with the public.”
According to Spande, discussions about the cost of village law enforcement revolved around the idea that the Village could save money by outsourcing Village police services to the DuPage County Sheriff’s office.
At the regular meeting on May 3, the Village Board had unanimously approved a $32,400 contract with REM Management Services of Lansing, IL for an operational and administrative analysis of the Winfield Police Department. According to Spande, the Village and County Sheriff were well into the process of contract proposals and counteroffers by the time the idea to obtain a consultant came up in an executive session on February 2. Calls for the discussion to be brought out in public were raised by Trustees Spande and James Hughes on February 16, Spande said.
According to Spande, Winfield Police Chief Stacy Reever had not officially been brought into the discussion even as representatives of REM Management Services gave a presentation during the Village Board’s executive session on March 15. Chief Reever confirmed that she had not been officially brought into the discussion until a proposal for the contract with REM became public.
It remains unclear whether Spande’s expulsion was made in accordance with the Village ordinance.
“You may have a cause of action for being improperly expelled from a meeting,” Village Attorney Kathy Elliott told Spande. “I can just advise the Board that they are subjecting themselves to liability.”
After Spande was escorted from Village Hall by Police Chief Stacy Reever, Trustee Tim Allen moved to censure Spande.
“I am a little shocked and amazed at the anger that we’re seeing here,” Trustee Allen said. “Because a municipality only has three options for finding revenues to fix long, long deferred maintenance problems that are in this village. We can tax you, we can grow and we can innovate in this way, innovate or cut expenses. We were doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing exactly when we were supposed to be doing it and I have no problems with what we did. I do think that Trustee Spande has done a gross breach of everyone’s confidence and I don’t think he is a hero for it. As a matter of fact I think he is the villian and unfortunately so. I mean, as a colleague, he was right there. He was supposed to be working with us shoulder to shoulder and he went and did his best to submarine what we were working on.”
The motion to censure Trustee Spande passed unanimously with Spande absent.
Read more in the print edition of the Winfield Post on newsstands Tuesday, May 22.