Judge keeps Niles Ethics Board election results sealed until April 25
Though Niles residents voted on April 4 for members of an elected ethics board, the results of that election — and indeed, whether an elected ethics board will even come to exist — will not be revealed until at least April 25, when Cook County Judge Araceli De La Cruz will rule on whether electing the village’s ethics board members contradicts state law.
The outcome of the election has remained under wraps due to an order from De La Cruz to Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough to not release results while a lawsuit by Niles resident Anthony Schittino makes its way through the court system.
The continuance is another extension of a three-year saga that began when Niles-Maine District Library Treasurer Joseph Makula tried to put a referendum question regarding whether the village should pivot to an elected ethics board on the November 2020 ballot.
Schittino’s lawsuit argues that electing the members of the ethics board violates the Illinois constitution by creating a government within a government.
At an April 13 hearing, Makula’s lawyer Daniel J. Kelley argued that previous litigation has already settled the matter of whether electing ethics board members is constitutional, and that voters had weighed in decisively on the matter.
In a village where a former mayor serving federal prison time is still a relatively recent memory, Kelley said, citizens were justified in backing the change. He was referring to the late Nicholas Blase, a Niles mayor who was convicted of taking kickbacks.
Kelley also suggested that Schittino’s lawsuit represented a last-ditch, village-backed attempt to quash the elected board, noting that now-Mayor George Alpogianis has consistently opposed the change.
“Mayor Alpogianis was an incumbent board trustee [at the time],” Kelley said. “He was opposed to it then; he’s opposed to it now.”
Schittino’s attorney Steven Laduzinsky rejected this suggestion.
“My client is not an apparatus of village government,” he said. “There is nothing to support that this is orchestrated by the current mayor.”
Laduzinsky characterized the switch to an elected board as “an attempt to dilute the power and authority of a home-rule unit by creating another form of government within the Village of Niles.”
Village attorney Ross Secler was also present at the hearing and said the village’s interest was in defending its home-rule authority.
This is the second lawsuit related to the board, which may be the first ethics body in the state and elsewhere to be elected. The first, resolved in June 2021, related to whether Makula’s referendum was an appropriate ballot question.
Eleven candidates ran for five seats on the elected ethics board: Jerry Acciari, Joy Alfonsi, Carol Bagley, Linda Bartucca, Jill Boysen, David Carrabotta, Jeffrey Riad Kash, Paul Kotowski, Dave Laske, Vera Pandev and Lisa Emmett-Stechman.
