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Daily Herald opinion: Government by the courts: DuPage clerk’s countersuit deepens counterproductive battle over accounting

Yes, it is growing tiresome to keep criticizing DuPage County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek for wasting taxpayer money on an apparently ego-driven contest with the DuPage County Board over whether she must abide by an accounting policy that every other elected official in the county accepts. But her Pyrrhic battle is disrupting government amid mounting costs to taxpayers and simply cannot be allowed to go unchecked.

The latest development in this now-yearslong spat is a countersuit Kaczmarek filed last week in response to a state’s attorney’s lawsuit seeking to compel her to abide by county policies regarding the payment of bills.

The regulation at issue applies when a department head submits a bill to be paid from an account which does not have sufficient budgeted funds to cover the payment. If the auditor is not told what account to make the payment from, the county will not pay the bill. Kaczmarek considers this requirement a violation of her authority to run her office as she sees fit. She says that as long as her budget has money available, it is no one’s business what fund bills are paid out of.

Kaczmarek also has squabbled with the county over its requirement that high-cost goods and services be open to public bids, a standard practice in transparent government fiscal management. Again, she argues that she knows her vendors and the taxpayers should trust her to get the best deals.

She said in a press release last week that the state’s attorney’s lawsuit “repeats the same points of law my office has been raising for over two years. Despite plain and unambiguous language (from the state attorney general) backing us up, the state’s attorney chooses to ignore it.”

Other officials, including County Board President Deborah Conroy and Auditor Bill White contend, reasonably, that the county is legally authorized to establish and enforce sound accounting practices — though it is just as valid a response to observe that law or no law, the practices the county has in place simply represent transparent, taxpayer-focused good government.

Yet, while Kaczmarek bristles at having to abide by such rules for the county board, she seems perfectly comfortable surrendering her, and everyone else’s, authority to the expensive civil court system. Facing unpaid bills totaling nearly $326,000, the county and the clerk agreed to an arrangement a week and a half ago whereby under court order the county will pay the bills — with specific line items identified to show where the money is coming from.

So, at least in the short term, the county clerk’s operations will proceed routinely. But one is hard put to understand what different conclusion a countersuit will produce from that which would result from the state’s attorney’s lawsuit. What is clear is that it is all costing a lot of taxpayer money — keeping in mind that outside representation had to be found for Kaczmarek because the state’s attorney’s office could not represent her.

And even if the clerk should prevail, she will have won a victory for sloppy, less-transparent, less-taxpayer-friendly procedures, while suffering stiff bruises to her reputation. In the face of such a potential outcome, it is irresponsible to keep silent.

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