Daily Herald opinion: What’s the holdup?: Six months in, county is still waiting for an attorney’ general’s ruling with widespread implications

DuPage County Board members had good reason to grumble last week as they reflected on a sluggish response from the state attorney general’s office to an appeal regarding the county clerk’s refusal to abide by county purchase and accounting policies.

The county’s hit on the legal bills in this yearslong standoff has reached nearly $280,000 and counting, the county already has a judge’s ruling in its favor and the Attorney General’s Office has been doing whatever it is doing in its investigation since last July — without yet even having interviewed the central figure in the case, DuPage County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek.

We have to agree with Board Member Mary Fitzgerald Ozog.

“There’s only one word I can use for this situation,” she said last week, “and that is ‘inexplicable.’ This is a waste of time, money and effort.”

In our view, it has been that from the beginning of this petulant stalemate. The DuPage County Board has established sound, well-established rules assuring economical, value-oriented and transparent management of the taxpayers’ money. Kaczmarek believes she can do better by making her own rules.

Of course, if every department head in every one of the state’s 102 counties ignored their governing board’s policies and managed their accounting practices according to their individual whim, taxpayers could find themselves wading through a potential riot of separate policies in order to understand what elected officials are buying, why they’re buying it, whether they’re getting the fairest price and how the purchases are monitored after they are made.

In that context, it is hard to understand how — regardless of legal interpretation — any responsible department head would balk at adhering to consistent standards governing the entire contingent of county offices. Kaczmarek, however, thinks differently and so far has been willing to expend $279,827 of the taxpayers’ money on legal fees to try to get her way.

Thus, the issue finds itself in the lap of the Attorney General’s Office, apparently slumbering quietly while accounting practices in DuPage County muddle into disarray.

Board Member Sam Tornatore likened the situation to “death by a thousand cuts, and the clerk owns the knife store.” He appealed to the state attorney general to realize that “that every day that investigation does not move forward is another dollar that the taxpayers are paying.”

We feel his pain. In the plain interest of good, taxpayer-focused practice, we wish Kaczmarek would abide by the county’s policies. But if she is right on the legal grounds and she can do whatever she pleases in spending and managing her office’s money, then she, the county and the taxpayers and voters deserve to know what behaviors carry the force of law.

Attorney General Kwame Raoul, we don’t know what your office has been doing regarding this case for six months, but we do know it is time that everyone got answers. The specific issue may involve just one county, but it has implications for all 102. Please give it the priority it merits.