Treasurer Stidham fights back in Portage: ‘I’ve been defamed’
Chicago Tribune
June 28, 2019
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-portage-clerk-mayor-st-0630-20190628-7j3b55ihy5e67n66krolkp5t64-story.html
The blooming battle between Portage Mayor John Cannon and Clerk-Treasurer Chris Stidham over Stidham’s hiring of his then-girlfriend to work as a contractor took a new twist Friday, as Cannon said checks made out to her businesses never cleared the board of works as required by state law.
In response, Stidham called the mayor’s actions “defamatory,” adding the checks, along with others from the city, didn’t come before the board because of a procedural matter.
The call and response came Friday, the day after Cannon announced he had formed a three-person executive committee to investigate Stidham. Cannon has called for Stidham, who’s term ends in December, to resign.
“He may not like the vendor that I selected. He may not like that we were in a relationship. He may not like that we got married, but at the end of the day, that’s not his job as mayor,” Stidham said.
The committee, Cannon said, found almost $70,000 in unapproved transactions from the clerk-treasurer’s office paid to three entities, Keeping the Books, ERG Advisors and Paramount Technology Solutions.
The board of works is expected to seek repayment of the invoices from those vendors at a meeting Wednesday because the transactions were not approved, Cannon said, adding the State Board of Accounts will meet with the committee about their findings Monday. Cannon has said two Democrats and a Republican, representing, in no particular order, the city council, the board of works and a department head, make up the committee. Cannon has declined to name them.
According to documents available on the Indiana Secretary of State’s office website, Keeping the Books and ERG Advisors both list Rachel Glass as owner. They had separate addresses on Valparaiso’s north side for four months each in 2015, with some overlap on when they were active.
Stidham confirmed that Glass, now Rachel Stidham, was his girlfriend at the time. The state did not have a listing for Paramount Technology Solutions.
“I believe that one was simply an assumed name registered through the county,” he said, adding not all of her businesses were registered through the state.
The invoices, he said, totaled somewhere around $50,000, not as much as suggested by Cannon, and covered a span of a year to 18 months.
Of the invoices, Cannon said some of the checks were sent to the Valparaiso addresses and the rest were sent to UPS stores in Merrillville and Valparaiso. He declined to say how many checks there were.
“There was no record of this. No one knew this money was coming out,” Cannon said, adding that state law requires the city’s board of works to approve all transactions, including contracts with vendors and those for the clerk-treasurer’s office.
Despite repeated requests since April, Cannon said, Stidham has yet to provide proof that the board of works approved the claims or the contracts for the work. Stidham has said he did not receive those requests until Tuesday, and they were similar to ones he fulfilled in the spring.
“The day before the wedding (between Stidham and Glass), there was a $6,000 check written to one of these companies,” Cannon said.
Stidham didn’t specifically know about the check before his wedding.
“I don’t dispute it but it would make sense,” he said, adding once he married, he and his wife would have been in violation of nepotism rules so final payments were likely being wrapped up before that date. He has said his wife has not worked in his office since they were married.
The lack of approval by the board of works, Stidham said, was procedural because of how claims were docketed for the board, something that he’s changed in recent months.
The docket of claims could shift dramatically and typically wasn’t a full accounting of all the claims paid out. “It’s a gross mischaracterization” for Cannon to pull a handful of claims and say they are outside of the normal process since it happens all the time, Stidham said.
“It’s defamatory, frankly, and that’s going to be the next step of all this,” he said. “I’ve been defamed.”
Stidham, who, with two other candidates lost the Democratic primary bid for the mayor’s seat to Council President Sue Lynch, D-At large, has called Cannon’s claims political, and said he was “lockstep” with former Mayor James Snyder, forced from office in mid-February and awaiting sentencing after a federal jury convicted him on two public corruption charges. Cannon will face Lynch on the November ballot.
Cannon said he will ask the city attorney to draft an ordinance requiring two signatures on any city-issued check. Though he didn’t have time to get the matter on the agenda for a vote during Tuesday’s city council meeting, he does expect it to come up for discussion.
Stidham said he doesn’t individually sign each check anyway and uses a stamp.
“If the staff has to stamp two different signatures, it makes no difference,” he said.
Cannon has not discussed the proposed ordinance with Lynch yet.
“I don’t see a huge problem with it, but it’s got to come before the council and I have to see what the verbiage is,” she said, adding the ordinance doesn’t sound like it’s targeting the clerk-treasurer’s office. “It’s just something a lot of places do.”
Councilman Bill Fekete, R-4th, who took Cannon’s seat after a caucus selected Cannon to replace Snyder and is the lone Republican on the council, said he didn’t know what the content of the ordinance would be.
“I have to say, there has to be steps taken to assure citizens that funds are not being misused,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe all the facts have come out yet.”
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