Did Burr Ridge Mayor Overstep Power?

BURR RIDGE, IL — Earlier this week, Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso prevented Village Board member Zach Mottl from voting on the board's resolution to censure Mottl. However, an attorney for a watchdog group says a mayor does not have the power to stop a member from voting.

Mottl's vote wouldn't have made a difference because the five other board members voted to censure him, accusing him of making an ethnic slur against the mayor by calling Grasso, an Italian American, a mobster.

When the roll call was taken on the resolution, the clerk read Mottl's name, but Grasso interjected and said three times "he does not get to vote" because the censure was about him. Without letting the clerk say another word, the mayor announced the tally as 5-0 and quickly moved to the next issue. Mottl did not protest, but was also told during the meeting not to interrupt.

In a text message to Patch, Grasso pointed to a rule in the village code that barred Mottl from voting. It states that members "shall not vote" when they are "directly or indirectly interested in the question." But the provision does not specifically delegate to the mayor or board the power to prevent a member from voting. It also does not define "interest."

In a later message, Grasso, a lawyer, indicated the rule was "self-policing."

"BR has a self-policing voting ordinance that expressly provides a trustee shall not vote when he or she has an interest in the proceeding," the mayor said. "It's not restricted to finances. He WAS the resolution. I noted the voting rule during roll call."

Grasso said Mottl violated the rule in February 2019 when he voted against his opponents' effort to remove him as acting mayor. This was during the time after Mayor Mickey Straub resigned and before Grasso defeated Mottl in the mayoral election. With Mottl's vote at the meeting, the board tied and he stayed in his position.

If the mayor's reading of the law is correct, then his allies, trustees Guy Franzese, Al Paveza and Tony Schiappa, also violated the rule when they voted against a proposal to censure them at the same 2019 meeting, resulting in another tie vote. The other trustees accused them of releasing information from a closed meeting.

Ben Silver, an attorney with the Elmhurst-based Citizen Advocacy Center, said the mayor does not have the power to prevent elected representatives from voting.

"It's on trustees and aldermen to recuse themselves," he said in an interview. "It's not for the head of the body to do that. It's not for the mayor to cut someone out."

If members fail to recuse themselves when they have financial conflicts of interest, Silver said, they could get in trouble with the law. He said he could see nothing in the Burr Ridge rule that allows the mayor to prevent a trustee from voting.

In a text message to Patch, Grasso said Silver "respectfully may be wrong." The mayor said he read the rule as deeming an abstention as a vote with the majority. The rule reads: "Every member who shall be present when a question is stated by the chair shall vote thereon, unless excused by the Board, or unless the member shall be directly or indirectly interested in the question, in which case the member shall not vote. The vote of a member who has not been excused from voting, who passes or refuses to vote, shall be counted as voting with the majority."

As for Patch's questions about the issue, Grasso said, "I know you thrive on creating controversy, but you're stretching to create it here."

Asked whether he would have let Mottl vote on the censure, the mayor did not send a response to the question.

The board also censured Mottl in November. He did not attend the meeting, so the issue of whether he could vote did not come up.

A censure serves as a reprimand and has no enforcement mechanism.