Next Interim City Manager May Surprise You

JOLIET, IL — The Joliet City Council considered at least six people to succeed Steve Jones as the next interim city manager of Joliet during a closed door special meeting held this week. Patch learned that the candidate who emerged with the most support is Joliet's interim corporation counsel Sabrina Spano.

Sources told Patch this week that five of the nine council members supported Spano as their choice to fill the vacancy when Jones departs Joliet Aug. 7. The council is expected to vote on Spano's appointment during its first meeting in August.

Jones gave his resignation notice on the night of July 7. During an interview with Joliet Patch's editor in late May, Jones said he expected to remain as interim city manager until after the April 2021 city council elections for the open seats of Don "Duck" Dickinson, Mike Turk and Jan Quillman.

Dickinson and Turk are political adversaries of Joliet Mayor Bob O'Dekirk while Quillman is a strong supporter of the mayor.

The 2021 election will determine whether O'Dekirk has the power to implement his agenda or whether councilman Pat Mudron, a long-time Joliet insurance agent, will continue to wield the political power. At the moment, Mudron — not O'Dekirk — has the upper hand.

Patch has learned that in addition to Spano, two prominent members of the Joliet community received support from the Joliet City Council to serve as interim city manager once Jones leaves next month.

Those Joliet businessmen in the running for interim city manager were Jim Roolf, who is the senior vice president and corporate relations officer of First Midwest Bank. Roolf has served on the boards of directors for Silver Cross Hospital, Will Counter Center for Economic Development, Joliet Catholic Academy and American Red Cross Illinois River Valley Chapter.

In addition to Roolf, one of Joliet's most notable private practice attorneys, Michael Hansen, also garnered support to take over as interim city manager, Patch has learned.

According to his law firm bio, Hansen was a partner with the Joliet law firm of Herschbach, Tracy, Johnson, Bertani & Wilson from 1976 to 1994. Hansen helped found the Empress Casino and he served as vice president and chief legal officer for Empress from 1994 until December 1999.

Practically every week, Hansen is a regular presence inside City Hall and many businesses and developers hire Hansen to speak on behalf of their projects that go before Joliet's City Council.

Besides Hansen, Roolf and Spano, the other three people considered for interim city manager were: inspector general Chris Regis, private practice attorney Jim Capparelli and lawyer Moira Dunn, a former prosecutor for Will County State's Attorney Jim Glasgow.

Dunn lost her election in the 2018 Democratic primary against David Garcia to become a Will County Circuit Court judge.

Nowadays, Dunn serves as chief of staff for the Will County Board.

Spano was hired at the city of Joliet in 2018 to fill a newly created position, assistant corporation counsel.

She worked in the same department as corporation counsel Marty Shanahan and Regis.

In October 2018, the city council negotiated a settlement to pay city manager David Hales $89,000 to break his three-year contract. After 10 months on the job, Hales, the former city of Bloomington manager, was not a good fit to run Joliet, city officials have said.

From October 2018 until June 2019, the council pulled Shanahan out of the city's legal department to serve as interim city manager. Then, after eight months in that position, Shanahan started to get backlash to his efforts to clean up the Joliet Police Department.

Sgt. Patrick Cardwell, Sgt. Dave Harris and Sgt. Larry Collins showed up at a Joliet City Council meeting and they raised their hands when Quillman polled the audience whether they wanted Shanahan out as city manager.

At that meeting, Mudron, Turk, Dickinson, Bettye Gavin and Sherri Reardon voted to oust Shanahan as interim city manager and send him back to the legal department.

Next, Mudron tried to bring former city manager Jim Hock, who was living in Michigan, out of retirement, but Hock and the council could not agree on the financial terms of a contract, so the deal to make Hock the city's interim city manager collapsed by August.

At that point, Mudron spoke with Steve Jones, the city's economic development director since 2015, and Jones agreed to serve as interim city manager. Jones received a salary increase of about $40,000 and a six-month contract to fill in as interim city manager.

Last fall, Joliet conducted a national search for a permanent city manager, but, given all the political upheaval, the city did not generate as many applications as some council members anticipated. Shanahan re-applied for the job, but the council did not select him as one of its three finalists.

Instead, the three finalists were:

• Joliet private practice attorney Jim Capparelli, who works for Castle Law and is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army. Capparelli worked as Illinois Assistant Attorney General, Bureau Chief, from 2005-2007.

• Will Jones, city administrator in the affluent Milwaukee suburb of Mequon, who previously ran the northern Illinois suburb of Glencoe, a village of about 9,000. Before that, Will Jones worked several years for Highland Park, Ill. Will Jones is not related to Steve Jones.

• J. Mark Rooney, former city manager in the western Chicago suburb of Carpentersville. In 2018, Rooney was paid $220,000 as part of an out-of-court settlement against Carpentersville, which got rid of him. Rooney then went to Rhode Island to become a town manager, and Rooney was actively looking for a new job after less than a year in Westerly, Rhode Island, a community seven times smaller than Joliet, according to news reports.

Back in January, Capparelli assured Joliet Patch he would not be offered the job as Joliet city manager, and he was right. With only Will Jones and Rooney left, councilwoman Sherri Reardon made the recommendation to spend another $1,600 to make them undergo a battery of psychologists tests.

Afterward, the council did not offer the job to Will Jones or Rooney, meaning the city's national job search proved unsuccessful, leaving the council back to square one.

In February, the Mudron 5 coalition voted to give Steve Jones a new contract, allowing him to retire from the city of Joliet and begin collecting his Illinois municipal pension, but remaining on the job at City Hall as an independent contractor.

Councilman Larry Hug berated Jones for proposing the arrangement, calling the practice highly unethical and double dipping on steroids.

Under the new contract supported by the Mudron 5 bloc, Joliet agreed to pay $135.10 per hour —or $281,000 annually —for Jones' services as interim city manager, on a month-to-month basis.

At that point, the council majority appeared to embrace the idea of letting Steve Jones remain as interim city manager as long as he wanted to fill the job at City Hall.

In March, the new coronavirus pandemic negatively affected the city's finances. By May, Jones fired his former boss, Marty Shanahan, as corporation counsel.

That same week, Jones told Joliet Patch's editor he planned to stick around Joliet City Hall until after the April 2021 city elections, once three of the council races are settled.

"I think spring of next year is time. It's probably the end of my rope," Jones told Joliet Patch in May. "I think I'm doing a decent job, and I'm willing to do it a little longer. Keep in mind I have been a city manager in other places for about 30 years."

Incidentally, Jones lives in La Grange Park, a fact that has rankled many on the Joliet City Council.

On July 7, the same night Jones was blasted at a Joliet City Council meeting by Black residents of Joliet, who were also critical of the Joliet Police Department's role in the Jan. 29 in-custody death of Eric Lurry, Jones announced his resignation during a closed session of the council.

This week, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH coalition came to Joliet City Hall, seeking the termination of all the Joliet police officers involved in Lurry's in-custody death.

The four main officers involved in Lurry's in-custody death were: Joliet Police Lt. Jeremy Harrison, Sgt. Doug May, field training officer Jose Tellez and new patrolman Andrew McCue.

This article originally appeared on the Joliet Patch