07092019 - News Article - Embattled clerk turns over Portage documents







Embattled clerk turns over Portage documents
Chicago Tribune
July 09, 2019
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-stidham-documents-st-0710-20190709-4nwpvkqy3zhgrogyeyd7aenr7m-story.html



Portage Clerk-Treasurer Chris Stidham provided that city’s mayor, the city attorney, a member of the Board of Works and the media with 122 pages of documents he promised to provide during a July 3 Board of Works meeting.

The documents include 1099s, account payable registers and the fronts and backs of checks related to work done by three companies owned by Rachel Glass, then Stidham’s girlfriend, in 2015 and 2016, under contract with the clerk-treasurer’s office. The work, Stidham has said, stopped once the two married in 2016.

The documents, which Stidham initially pledged to provide Friday but said were delayed when the bank statements he needed were no longer online, arrived via email Monday afternoon in the latest volley between him and Mayor John Cannon, who has asked, unsuccessfully, for Stidham to resign.

The documents weren’t enough to satisfy Cannon, who in the spring established a three-person executive investigative committee to determine whether Stidham was involved in any wrongdoing.

Though that committee’s work was done, Cannon said the Board of Works has asked the committee to review the documents in greater detail and draft an addendum to their report based on any additional findings, and said there are a number of discrepancies within the documents.

“We received the documents, the very documents that the committee asked for in a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request in May,” he said, adding Stidham had seven days to respond to the request but didn’t do so then, “and there’s still no response to the FOIA request.”

Stidham has said he provided most of the documents requested by the committee in the spring, though Cannon has disagreed.

“I guess the question is, why now and not then?” Cannon said.

On July 2, Cannon released a redacted, 15-page report put together by the committee, which he has said is bipartisan and comprised of a City Council member, a Board of Works member and a city department head.

The committee’s report noted that it is “sufficiently likely” that Stidham’s payments to his then-girlfriend for the work violated a number of state and federal criminal as well as civil statutes, and questioned whether she performed the work at all.

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Stidham has said the accusations are retaliation for his January testimony during the federal trial of disgraced former Mayor James Snyder, who awaits sentencing on two federal corruption charges, during which the payment to Glass first came up.

According to the 1099 tax forms, Rachel Glass made a total of $58,416.16 in 2015 and 2016 between her three companies, Paramount Technology Solutions, ERG Advisors and Keeping the Books.

The last invoices in the documents were both on Aug. 8, 2016, and were $3,000 to Paramount and $4,000 to ERG. Stidham has said the last invoices came in shortly before the couple’s wedding because they had to be cleared out before the two married so they didn’t run afoul of anti-nepotism rules.

The invoices list bank account reconciliation and database work as the brunt of the tasks done by the companies on contract.

The documents, said Cannon, don’t include contracts between the clerk-treasurer’s office and the three businesses.

And they won’t, Stidham said, because there were no contracts.

“It’s not criminal. It’s what I told the State Board (of Accounts),” Stidham said, adding he met with the board Monday, and the board will be in his office for three weeks investigating that and other matters.

The board, he said, is reviewing everything and is qualified to do so. Cannon also has said he met with the board earlier this month about the matter.

Cannon, Stidham said, is making accusations but thus far hasn’t given him a copy of the committee’s report, all the while making “inflammatory and defamatory remarks” that are beneath Cannon and the office of mayor.

Cannon, Stidham said, seems to have a personal vendetta against him.

“The whole thing smells of personal politics,” Stidham said.

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