illi News - Who is Spending the Calumet City Clerk's Budget?

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Taxpayer funds being used without proper authorization by Mayor Thaddeus Jones

CALUMET CITY, Ill. - illiNews -- For several months, Calumet City Clerk, Nyota Figgs, has been locked out of the budget software that she is supposed to use to run her office. On September 3, Clerk Figgs alerted Calumet City attorney Mike Kasper that she no longer had any access to the financial software that monitors her budget. This week, she discovered that expenditures are being made out of her office accounts that she neither requested nor authorized.

At the time, Clerk Figgs notified Attorney Kasper that Mayor Jones,"... blocked me from using the financial software system to monitor my office budget. I now have no control nor ability to monitor any monies that are being spent by the City Clerk's office. Additionally, I have been blocked from doing my duties as Collector."

Clerk Figgs said, "Mayor Thaddeus Jones has gone too far in his campaign to bully me and to attempt to undermine my authority. He has hired unnecessary employees and put them into my office to do his bidding, not to carry out the duties of the City Clerk's office. He has denied me access to my office and changed the locks. He sent his minions to the City Clerk's vault and removed items from it without my knowledge or consent. Now, he or someone he controls, is spending the City Clerk's budget. He has used his position as Mayor to act as a bully and a thug, not a leader."

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Mayor Jones actions have put the people of Calumet City in jeopardy. While Clerk Figgs is insured and bonded to carry out her duties as the City Clerk and Collector, those duties have been yanked from her and are being carried out at Mayor Jones' behest by persons unknown who are neither bonded nor insured to do those duties.

Clerk Figgs said, "This is a problem not just for me, but for all of Calumet City. I am bonded and insured to do my duties. Whoever the Mayor has performing these duties is not. That puts all of us in a fiscally precarious situation."

But the Mayor has not stopped his bullying and malfeasance there. In another questionable action, someone in the Mayor's office has been unlawfully using Clerk Figg's signature. The Mayor or someone under his direction has used her signature on business licenses that she has not issued nor authorized. These business licenses are not proper as they have a forged signature on them. Clerk Figgs does not know who faked her signature on the improperly issued licenses, but, if the Mayor has committed signature theft or directed it to be done, he could be in serious trouble. Signature theft is a serious crime that can result in criminal charges and jail time.

In addition to this harassment and potentially criminal activity, the Mayor has also had time (remarkable since he is both the Calumet City Mayor and an Illinois State Representative) to cause his staff to instruct Clerk Figgs to destroy old city files in order to make room for new information. Then, after the file destruction was complete, the Mayor had more time to instruct the auditor to tell the Clerk she had improperly destroyed the records. Rather than take the quickest route and pick up the phone and call the Clerk to tell her to stop destroying the records (you remember those records, the records that the Mayor had his staff tell her to destroy) the Mayor chose instead to commission a lawsuit using city resources. He did this before he received authorization from the City Council to do so, in order to demand that Clerk Figgs stop shredding the records that his staff instructed her to shred.

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More money spent by Calumet City on legal costs and who knows what else? This brings us right back to where we started. Someone is spending the City Clerk's budget which is, after all, the taxpayer's money, on things that she does not know about and does not authorize. At the same time, the Mayor is spending taxpayer money on lawsuits for things that could have been settled by a phone call. When is the Mayor going to stop wasting Calumet City funds, stop interfering with the City Clerk's job and start doing his job without harassing and bullying everyone else? It is time for the Mayor to cease and desist.