City Council Considers Censure Of Clerk Over Staff Complaints

EVANSTON, IL — Aldermen declined to formally rebuke City Clerk Devon Reid Monday after Mayor Steve Hagerty asked that the clerk be censured for a series of violations of the city's healthy work environment policy, the Illinois Open Meetings Act and Evanston City Council rules. After a 5-4 vote to table the resolution, the measure could be reconsidered at any future meeting.

In April, three city employees, including two in the law department with whom Reid had clashed on public records issues, filed complaints against Reid alleging violations of the city's employee policies. In response, the city hired the outside law firm of Robbins Schwartz to conduct an independent investigation.

"I want to stress that the City Council takes allegations of harassment of our city employees very, very seriously," Hagerty said.

The timing of the complaints and subsequent probe coincided with a letter from Reid's attorney warning city attorneys that he planned to ask a judge to declare the city was in violation of the Freedom of Information Act if staff continued to decline to provide him with police body camera footage or records deemed attorney-client privileged. A couple weeks later, Reid filed a lawsuit against the city, City Manager Wally Bobkiewicz and Corporation Counsel Michelle Masoncup in Cook County Circuit Court.

"[Robbins Schwartz] conducted an investigation interviewing other city employees, interviewing Clerk Reid and appropriate findings were made," the mayor said at the start of the July 15 meeting. "During the course of the allegations into the healthy work environment complaints, one of the complainants provided a recording that they believed was evidence of harassment that should be considered."

The recording and allegations that Reid violated the Open Meetings Act were discovered during the course of the investigation into the employees' complaints, Hagerty said. According to him, they were not the basis for initiating the investigation. The mayor confirmed two of the complaints were sustained and the third was not.

Evanston Patch obtained a copy of a letter from Hagerty to Reid summarizing the findings of the internal investigation as well as an unsent draft of a letter to the Cook County State's Attorney's Office from Joseph Perkowski, an attorney with Robbins and Schwartz, requesting an investigation into possible violations of official misconduct provisions in state law. An Evanston resident who is not a city employee or elected official provided the documents, which were discussed in a closed-door July 8 meeting, and Patch independently verified their authenticity.

According to Hagerty's letter, the investigation found that Reid violated the city's policies against workplace harassment and creating a hostile work environment, retaliated against an employee who sought to join a union, used profanity to describe a lawyer for the city, smelled like marijuana at work, engaged in sexually charged discussions within earshot of an employee, engaged in"hostile debates with [the complainant] related to FOIA matters" and provided an audio recording containing a sexually charged discussion to a city staffer.

"Mr. Reid, the allegations and findings against you are concerning and disappointing," Hagerty said. "As an elected official, you are representing [Evanston] and this behavior is not representative of the community and its standards and values."

Reid disputed most of the allegations, although he admitted he had not done enough to stop interns from discussing their personal lives during breaks and may have used crude language to describe a city employee with whom he had clashed on policy issues. Several of the allegations, he said, were connected to an accidentally recorded audio file.

"There is a claim of harassment. Part of the evidence that substantiates the claim of harassment, and part of the claim that substantiates that I violated the Open Meetings Act, is an 111-hour recording where we ended executive session on April 23, 2018 — it was a 13-minute executive session," Reid said. "Somehow the recording did not stop when the executive session ended, I took my work laptop, which I use to record executive sessions, home with me. It recorded 111 hours of my personal life, and 91 hours into that recording I had a personal conversation with my partner."

Reid said while he would not want the conversation made public, but it did not contain any evidence of misconduct or abuse. It was not clear when the one-year-old, four-and-a-half-day-long recording was discovered or reviewed by staff.

The audio recording also contained conversations between Reid and two aldermen that took place after the executive session last year. The draft of the letter from the city's outside counsel to Cook County prosecutors suggested the recording constituted a violation of state laws against eavesdropping and the Illinois Human Rights Act because it subjected the employee who listened to it to sexual harassment.

"To say that I harassed someone because they listened 91 hours into a recording is insane," Reid said. He said he fully cooperated with investigators and had been as honest as possible, "believing there was an honest process." But, the clerk said, he was never presented any evidence of his alleged misconduct. Reid contrasted the process he faced with the ethics board procedure that led to the council's last censure vote — last December's 5-4 rules committee vote against issuing a censure to 8th Ward Ald. Ann Rainey, who was provided an attorney during a quasi-judicial ethics board proceeding that found ethics violations.

Hagerty said there was significantly more to the allegations than the improperly recorded audio file.

"The findings of the investigation, that you harassed, that you threatened, and that you retaliated against the city employees, has little to do with that recording," the mayor told Reid. "The recording, in that instance, is about violating the Open Meetings Act and removing executive session recordings from the city, where it's supposed to be retained at all times."

After the motion to table the censure resolution passed, 3rd Ward Ald. Melissa Wynne said it was vital to assure city staff they would be believed if they made allegations of harassment or retaliation.

"I am furious. As someone who was not believed 30 years ago, I don't ever want that to happen to anybody else where they are working, ever," Wynne said. "I am appalled that as a City Council we cannot vote — we chose not to vote tonight to protect our city employees. Appalled. I am angry at the folks that don't recognize that there are rights for everybody involved here, and as an elected official we are public officials. We have a different standard applied to us."

City employees, she said, are not public officials and deserve to have their privacy and personnel records protected.

"What is the message that we send to our city employees? 'It's OK if you get harassed by one of us, we're untouchable,'" Wynne said.

Wynne was joined in voting against tabling the resolution — essentially voting in favor of Reid's immediate censure — by 1st Ward Ald. Judy Fiske, 4th Ward Ald. Don Wilson and 7th Ward Ald. Eleanor Revelle.

Ald. Cicely Fleming, 9th Ward, said she too had faced workplace misconduct, and she would not want the details of that violation to be made public.

"I come in this building a lot and I can tell you that morale in this building is very low. That is one of the things that people — and nothing pertaining to this case — staff have told me that they don't necessarily have a place to go to complain about management or whatever that is," Fleming said.

"I believe that I have to send a message to our staff that they are protected. Does that mean that I think Clerk Reid is a horrible person? I do not. It means I have a standard of which I expect us all to act and I expect our staff to act," she said. "Just as we have staff who I don't think are doing a great job — the city manager will tell you that I'm always telling him, 'Hey, X,Y and Z needs to go,' — but I don't get to make that choice. So the choices I get to make I take very seriously."

The firm hired to investigate the complaints, Robbins Schwartz, is the same one that represented former Corporation Counsel Grant Farrar when he was named in the 2015 federal civil rights lawsuit filed by the city's former Public Works Director Suzette Robinson, who accused Bobkiewicz of racial discrimination and retaliation.

Farrar, a former employee at Robbins Schwartz, and Jennifer Lin, Evanston's human resources division manager, "set out to fabricate healthy work environment complaints against me," Robinson alleged.

"Lin undertook to interview multiple employees to dig up dirt on me. Not one of these employees had approached Ms. Lin voluntarily to lodge complaints about me. Rather, they were called in by Ms. Lin and interrogated," according to the suit. "Many of those employees were observed leaving their interviews with Ms. Lin in tears."

Aldermen eventually approved a settlement to end the lawsuit without admitting any wrongdoing. The city wound up paying $500,000, plus litigation costs, to resolve the claims.

Two years before Robinson's complaint, in another civil rights suit against the city, Farrar was accused of sexual harassment and gender discrimination by another attorney in the law department. According to the suit, Bobkiewicz, himself a few months into the Evanston city manager job, hired Farrar as the city's top lawyer over several qualified women candidates "despite the fact that he did not have any experience with many of the most basic functions and legal areas practiced by Evanston Corporation Counsel."

Reid has been no stranger to controversy since even before he was elected to office in April 2017, defeating two-term incumbent Rodney Greene by a nearly 2-1 margin. His election followed his long-shot run for alderman of Chicago's 26th Ward in 2011 and his unlawful arrest for declining to provide his birthday to Officer Amy Golubski while collecting signatures to run for office in Evanston in 2016. Police admitted the arrest was improper and moved to suspend Golubski, who appealed the discipline and remains on the force.

Less than six months after Reid was sworn in, aldermen moved to reduce his responsibilities after complaints about the disclosure of the name of a minor and a victim of a crime that had not been redacted by the police department were temporarily visible on the city's public records portal.

In the fall of 2017, the City Council decided to allow Reid to remain responsible for requests under the Freedom of Information Act but to hide the city's archive of more than 1,000 records requests from public viewing. An increase in the number of requests followed.

That increase, some of which appears to have resulted from more duplicate requests, would later be cited by the city as the purported justification for removing from Reid's office any responsibility for handling police or legal related public records.

Around the same time, retired Health and Human Services Director Evonda Thomas-Smith accused Reid of costing the city a state grant due to a postage error — a charge that turned out not to be accurate. Thomas-Smith would later tell police she believed Reid had illegally recorded a conversation where he confronted her about the allegation, although no charges were ever filed.

After the Thanksgiving holiday, the tension between Reid and Bobkiewicz became more visible, Patch reported at the time. Bobkiewicz told the clerk he was not invited to a holiday party after an aldermen had invited him. Reid told the city manager he was not invited to a conversation with another staff member during a break in a racial equity training session. Bobkiewicz responded by describing Reid as "the biggest asshole I've ever worked with" in a room full of department heads.

In February 2018, Reid was arrested by Evanston police on a charge of driving with a suspended license and issued citations for for failure to use a turn signal. That May, all charges were dismissed, and dashboard-mounted camera footage obtained by Patch showed Reid indeed used his turn signal, contrary to the officer's report. It was not clear from the footage why the arresting officer found him suspicious.

In June 2018, the City Council considered putting a referendum on that November's ballot to shift the position of city clerk from an elected to an appointed position. Aldermen did not move forward with that effort.

Conflict continued into 2019 over the ongoing refusal by city attorneys to allow the clerk's office access to body-worn camera footage provided in response to public records requests, as well as correspondence involving the city's bond counsel related to the public hearing process for the issuance of $85 million in bonds, most of which has been earmarked for the new Robert Crown community center.

By April 29, as Patch reported, attorney Ed Mullen sent Masoncup a letter on Reid's behalf claiming the city was in violation of the statutory requirements of FOIA and demanding body camera footage and unredacted documents. Masoncup declined, and Reid filed suit on May 7.

Within weeks, the City Council voted 5-3 to put the law department and police department in charge of responding to any FOIA requests dealing with legal or law enforcement records. It appeared the move to add several appointed FOIA officers to replace the city's elected one was aimed at making Reid's lawsuit moot, although Hagerty and other supporters of the change did not mention the suit.

In the city's motion to dismiss the suit, filed July 3, Deputy City Attorney Victoria Benson said Reid lacked standing to pursue his claims against the city in his official capacity, Masoncup and Bobkiewicz should be removed as defendants and that a judge lacks any jurisdiction to invalidate the City Council’s actions when it violates its own self-imposed rules.

Plus, as an officer of the municipal corporation, Reid cannot pursue claims against the city in his official capacity, she argued.

"By proceeding in his official capacity against the City, [Reid] has created an action the effect of which is the City suing itself," Benson said.

Related:

• Mayor Proposes Bypassing City Clerk With Appointed FOIA Officers
• Evanston City Clerk Sues City Attorney, City Manager Over FOIA
• Emails, Police Report Detail Evanston City Hall 'Witch Hunt'