What a Waste of a Yard Waste Site

 

Someone asked the question on Nextdoor:

“I was wondering why the residents were not informed Before this was sold to Mitch King,? I feel the residents really did not have much of a say or input into this deal. The small area where what is now to be our waste site was all wetland and swamp. Are you going to eventually move the compost and mulch over to our site? “

Here is my answer:

You are correct. The public barely knew about this sale. Actually, it turned out that the Village Board didn't even know about it half as much as we thought we did at the time of the approval of the sale. This was due to key information that was withheld from the Village Board by the Village Administrator and Community Development Director.

When Mr. Paul Jaeger complained to Community Development Director Randy Fifrick about the secrecy surrounding the sale, and why the piece wasn't made available for sale on the open market, Mr. Fifrick's response was basically “because legally, we don't have to do that”.

I was elected in April 2018, and the final agreement and sale of the Yard Waste Site took place toward the end of that year. I was still relatively new to the trustee position, and I'll admit that I was at that time too trusting of the integrity of certain Village Staff members. Since the negotiations had been going on since 2014, I was coming in at the tail end of the sale process in 2018 , and I assumed that the common sense, fundamental details had been well discussed by that time. Mr. Fifrick and Downey promoted the sale to the Board as a good thing, and no one else on the Board had issues with it.

Remember, once the negotiation process had been started in 2014, it was all conducted in closed sessions after that, so there were no minutes or any other documentation for me or anyone else to refer back to, in order to be brought up to date on it. I understood that all that was left, was to negotiate an acceptable price. This was worked out in 2018, and the sale was approved by the Board..

I voted in favor of the sale, based on the information available to us, and under the premise that the Village had no use for that land. They had already clear-cut and sold the lumber off of it in about 2016, and we were told that it was unsuitable for houses or other development.

Then, right after the sale was completed, the truth started to come out. It appeared that the Village Board had been seriously misled through the means of withheld information, into approving what I now consider to be a very bad deal.

As I said in my previous post: “Among that missing information was the fact that land that the Village kept to use as a new yard waste site was in fact DNR-designated wetlands.”

This costly news was revealed only after the sale was complete. The Board soon learned that there was almost $10.000 in costs just to get permission from the DNR to use the 7 acres near the road, due to its wetland designation.

In addition to that, even with the PW crew's work in leveling the mounds and filling holes that were there, we now have an estimated $20,000 worth of granite that is still needed to finish off the area to create a functional mini yard waste site. So, we had at least $30,000 in costs unrevealed to the Board, just to turn the piece into an acceptable yard waste work area, and that work area is now much smaller than we were led to believe it would be.

But there was more news to come:

After extensive investigation, I learned that it was Mr. Fifrick who seemed to be the main driver of this sale from the very beginning, under Mr. Downey's supervision. To start with, they effectively bypassed the normal committee review process on this matter. The committee is made up of two trustees and three citizen members. The committee process is intended to provide an examination and research of the facts, and an evaluation and recommendation to the Village Board about decisions like this.

The idea of whether or not to even sell the land should have been investigated by the PIC committee, and a recommendation made to the Board before any negotiations on price even took place. This was not done.

Instead of honoring PIC committee's request for information about this matter, for some reason Mr. Fifrick took the purchase offer and pitched it directly to the Village Board.

The property was never appraised for its commercial (granite) value before the sale. Fifrick simply compared it to a nearby piece of land that had no known mineral value, and was assessed at $2700 per acre as a benchmark value.

The Public Works Department was also bypassed in this decision-making process. I learned after the sale that the PW crew was extremely unhappy with the proposed sale, because they put a lot of work into creating that nice, flat working surface at the Yard Waste Site. Public Works also needed a place to dump the fill that they get from road work, culvert replacement, etc. as an essential part of normal operations. The old Yard Waste Site had plenty of room for that.

The Board was told nothing of the importance of this property to Public Works operations, or of the PW crew leader's protests against the sale, or their “must retain” map of the old yard waste site area.

Instead of passing this information on to the Village Board, I have been told by 3 witnesses that the PW crew and its new Director, were told to basically butt out if the matter, and keep their mouths shut about it. Unfortunately this is what they did.

Once the negotiations were complete, the normal process was for the sale agreement to have gone to the APC committee for review and approval according to Village ordinance. This also was not done.

Finally, Fifrick, still under Downey's supervision, was required by law to submit the sale agreement to the Village Planning Commission for their evaluation and approval. This is required by State Statute 63.23 (5). Again, this was not done.

So I think you can see that there are red flags of malfeasance all over this situation, and I believe that the Board would never have approved the sale if we had been informed of certain facts. Additionally, had the committee involvement process been followed, it would have allowed the public to know what was going on, and Planning Commission approval would have provided another level of scrutiny.

Any one of these required steps may have triggered questions and information that would have stopped the deal.

In hindsight with the experience that I now have, I also believe that the closed sessions that President Voll held for this sale due to the “negotiations” exemption, was possibly illegal and at the very least unethical. Closed sessions for negotiations are supposed to protect the public interest, and that interest is supposed to outweigh the public's right to know details of what is happening in that meeting; allowing for a closed session.

In this case however, the closed sessions only served to work in favor of the buyer of the property, not the Village. In effect, the secrecy of the closed sessions prevented any other interested party from stepping in and outbidding this buyer, and the higher selling price would obviously have been in the public's better interest.

I believe that on several levels, the sale of the Yard Waste Site was a legal, financial, and ethical fiasco. Some people have called it an outright scam.

The deception and betrayal that the Board and taxpayers suffered is still a sore spot for me. However, the learning experience served as a wake-up call for me to question and confirm everything that I am presented with to vote on. I have been criticized for asking too many questions, but I think this approach is basic common sense and a fulfillment of my oath of office. Questions and the information gained from them have been very beneficial to the taxpayers' interests on quite a number of occasions, and without exaggeration these questions have changed outcomes and have gained or saved the Village well over a million dollars in the past few years.

   I have lots of emails and documentation to back up what I have just told you..

 After I raised this issue for months and proved my case, Mr Downey had to basically concede in 2021 that what I have just told you is true, although his statements are couched in CYA excuses and rhetoric. For example, when I said the PW crew and director were told to butt out and keep quiet about it, Downey describes that situation like this:

“While the Public Works Director tried to communicate the wishes of the field crew, not enough time was provided to him to put together meetings and reports, and he was distracted by other duties. Hence his voice was minimized.”

It certainly was “minimized”. He was not even allowed to say "Hey, the crew HATES this idea!"

 No reports or meetings necessary.

This is just one of many stories I could tell of malfeasance and shady activities in Kronenwetter that I have documented and have almost always reported to President Voll.  Without exception have been effectively ignored.

As for the yard waste site – the plan is to move the composting operation over to the new site once it is ready. At that point all of the compost will belong to the Village again, and we'll go from there. There should be a supply of compost available to village residents through this changeover process.