Mayor threatens to call officer

Tonight's Village Board meeting in Island Lake was verbally combative and, as the same time, one in which the trustees really opened up with communication.

The Trustees and the residents clearly wanted to know what was going on with the suspension of two officers of the police department, Acting Chief Anthony Sciarrone and Officer Fred Manetti.

Big news came just before 10:00PM with the statement that the "incident" which prompted Mayor Debbie Herrmann to arbitrarily and unilaterally suspend Sciarrone had occurred on Monday morning (February 15) just before she emailed the Trustees about it, not on Friday as previously reported in the press. No information about the incident was disclosed, but one trustee offered earlier in the meeting that nothing he had learned caused him to think that any discipline would approach the level of the discipline imposed by the mayor, called "paid administrative leave" in the press before tonight's meeting.

Trustee Saville tried to elicit information about rules for suspending the chief from Don Alexander, the attorney present from the Village's law firm, Ancel Glink. No one asked why Scott Puma wasn't present. Saville was trying to learn about the "grey area" of discipline that is less harsh than termination or suspension. He never got an answer to the question he was asking.

(Acting) Chief Sciarrone holds the department rank of sergeant. Procedures allow the mayor to remove the chief, but discipline of Sciarrone as sergeant (or chief) ought to fall under the rules of the Village's Board of Fire and Police Commissioners. That sticky little requirement didn't make it to the table for discussion.

It was clarified for the trustees tonight that Sciarrone was working without the contract as Acting Chief under which he had served. Apparently, that contract expired last Spring. That one got some of the trustees by surprise. So was the Island Lake Police Department actually functioning without a Chief of Police for several (many?) months?

Trustee Ponio questioned why the mayor had bypassed the chief, when she suspended Ofc. Fred Manetti on January 1. Under normal chain-of-command procedures, it should have been the chief who suspended one of his officers. And no one asked why Fred's suspension hadn't already gone before the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners.

At one point the quarreling between Mayor Herrmann and Trustee Rabattini got so verbally combative that Herrmann asked Rabattini if she (Rabattini) wanted her (Herrmann) to "call an officer." That produced outcries of "Out of order" from the audience. No doubt that everyone in the room remembered the charges filed by Herrmann against a resident who gestured to his neighbor but caused Herrmann to feel so alarmed and disturbed, breaching her peace, that she had the man arrested a few days later and charged with disorderly conduct. Those charges were thrown out after the man secured representation by a high-powered Chicago Loop law firm.

I've been trying to recall the exact sequence of who said what. I think Trustee Ponio and Mayor Herrmann were going at it, and Trustee Rabattini entered the verbal fray. Or Rabattini had the floor and the mayor interrupted. When Rabattini continued to talk, since she had the floor, that's when the mayor threatened to call the cops.

Is it a crime in Island Lake to talk when the Mayor is talking?

One resident called to the Trustees' attention that only one set of Minutes have been published on the Village's website since May. I forgot to ask him if he knew whether any Minutes had been prepared and approved at subsequent meetings of the Village Board. No approval of Minutes was scheduled on tonight's Agenda.

These are just the highlights of tonight's meeting. There was much more. I left at 10:00PM, as the Village Board was preparing to go into Executive Session.