A couple of months in the past, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was tasked with investigating the spending habits of self-proclaimed “Tremendous Mayor” Tiffany Henyard of Dolton Village. The investigation findings appeared to verify the outrageous misuse of taxpayer cash.
Final 12 months, the Dolton Village trustees sourced Lightfoot to steer an exterior noncriminal probe into the allegations of Henyard misusing taxpayer funds for her personal luxurious. In a jam-packed assembly Monday night on the Lester Lengthy Area Home, Lightfoot revealed what she present in a 73-page presentation.
Lofty Spends of Village Funds
Lightfoot mentioned six totally different bank cards had been utilized by the village from January 2021 to June 2024. With no receipts and restricted details about what was being bought with mentioned bank cards, there was barely any solution to monitor the purchases, per The Chicago Solar-Instances. Nonetheless, Lightfoot did discover the playing cards had been used to cowl bills of two Las Vegas journeys Henyard took with a number of village officers in 2022 and 2023.
Lightfoot’s probe additionally discovered that the bank cards coated over $170,000 on journey, baggage charges and rental automobiles, about $50,00 on eating places, $7,000 which was allotted for her private hair and make-up workforce, and 1000’s of {dollars} had been spent at shops together with Greatest Purchase, Wayfair, Apple and Amazon.
Together with bogus spending on nonessential items, Henyard was additionally clocked for not disbursing funds accordingly. Lightfoot discovered Henyard didn’t make the most of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of American Rescue Plan Act funds and pay again distributors for his or her companies, the report says. Dolton at present owes $5 million to distributors.
How Henyard Hid Her Spending
To maintain all of this from reaching the trustees, Lightfoot accused Henyard of creating a “concerted and systematic effort” to hide the funds. Lightfoot mentioned this was partly as a result of little oversight into Henyard’s spending and the very fact her workplace went with no finance director for almost all of 2024.
Within the interim, they tasked the village’s accounting agency to take over a number of duties together with composing buying lists which had been shared with the board of trustees, The Solar-Instances experiences. Nevertheless, in some unspecified time in the future in 2022, the probe discovered that the trustees had been randomly blocked from receiving common finance experiences.
“All through our impartial inquiry, we constantly encountered a mayor and administration that evaded transparency — skirting FOIA legal guidelines, failing to supply requested paperwork, and in any other case refusing to cooperate with the investigation,” mentioned Lightfoot.
Dolton Shifting Ahead
So, now we learn about Henyard’s soiled laundry. What’s subsequent? Effectively, Lightfoot’s presentation included a listing of suggestions together with the institution of a municipal code to maintain higher tabs on village funds, per the Solar-Instances. Nevertheless, Lightfoot additionally mentioned she contacted the U.S. legal professional’s workplace for potential additional motion, in line with the Chicago Tribune.
Henyard didn’t attend the assembly. Although, she shared some phrases about how she felt in regards to the findings via her legal professional.
“Lori Lightfoot is a failed mayor whose fiscal irresponsibility was overwhelming. The concept that any credibility may very well be given to her ‘findings’ about one other mayor’s monetary selections is preposterous. That is an effort by a failed political determine desperately in search of the limelight to which she is now not entitled,” mentioned Henyard’s attorneys in a press release.