Maybe it’s just me, but did anybody find it unusual that the City of Naperville’s lead attorney (Margo Ely), who also functioned as the Human Resource director, left town quickly, and I mean quickly. Her departure was announced during the Naperville city council meeting on April Fool’s Day.
Naperville’s Mayor Pradel, made it abundantly clear that “she will not be here for the meeting on April 15th”, two weeks later. That left no wiggle room for a change of heart on her part. Reports had it, that when she turned out the lights in her office, she was out the door and in her car before the room was dark.
The strange part is that within a month of her departure, allegations surfaced about bullying, drug use, and other inappropriate behavior on the part of Human Resource Department ‘leaders’. At least one complaint was filed by an eight-year Human Resource Department employee.
It’s possible that everything in the HR department began to fall apart the moment Ely left. I mean it is possible, right? It’s also possible the Cubs could win the World Series this year, right?
Lots of things can and do happen in the inky shadows of city hall.
This story won’t be going away soon. Now that Ely is gone, she has conveniently distanced herself from the ‘cauldron of boiling tar’ within the city. That leaves Naperville city manager, Doug Krieger, to take the heat, which is great for the Naperville city council. As long as Krieger is bumbling and stumbling, the council is separated by one-degree from the allegations, any wrong-doing, and ineffective leadership.
In essence, Krieger is an insurance policy for city council members. They can blame ‘it’ on Krieger,’ it’ being everything that goes wrong. The council wouldn’t be incorrect, since Naperville City Manager has had an unending series of major mis-steps.
As long as the city council is unwilling to ‘take action’ by launching Krieger, they become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
When the cats are away or never existed the mice and rats play. Unfortunately, the chief rat still remains comfortably ensconced in the womb of city hall. Government employees never get fired only promoted to the next level of total incompetence or given bonuses in direct proportion to their costly boondoggles.
You mean like the IT department winning the award for excellent service right after the city got hacked and was down for a month?
Or the City receiving the Municipality of the Year Award from IMEA before the Council was told by Krieger and Curran that the Electric Utility had a negative cash flow of $22M reported to be due to escalating IMEA electric costs? Or that the City paid Calico Energy $779,550.00 for an ePortal feature that didn’t work out? It’s appears to be a management mess. It must be cleaned up before the entire city work force is demoralized, the Electric Utility goes broke and the taxpayers end up on the hook for even higher borrowing and taxes.