Cook County Mismanagement Plunges The Library Into A Fiscal Crisis
By Kevin Gosztola
The Elmwood Park Public Library faces a fiscal crisis due to Cook County’s failure to send out property tax bills on July 1.
At the monthly library board meeting on August 11, Library Director Michael Consiglio announced that the library was coordinating with the village government to pass an ordinance, which would allow the library to cover at least $175,000 in expenses.
“We’ll keep expenses down to the minimum. We’ve already notified our main vendors that they will not receive payment,” Consiglio shared. “Any of the automatic payments that we’ve had, we’ve canceled all of them, and again, we’ve notified all the vendors.”
The library director said the library typically receives the majority of tax distributed funds in August. “We don’t have large reserves so this impacts us greatly.”
Tyler Technologies, a Plano, Texas corporation, was hired in 2015 to modernize the property tax system and help Cook County move away from a system “supported by 1970’s-era mainframe applications.” By October 2016, the hired contractor had already missed a major deadline.
On July 3, the Chicago Tribune reported that “controversial contractor Tyler Technologies’ upgrades to the countywide property tax systems” were once again “running behind schedule, leading to mounting frustration and political fighting among county leaders.”
Bills are due by August 1. However, Crain’s Chicago Business noted on July 28 that Cook County had yet to finish “computing the amount of millions of bills.” The county was not likely to mail bills until September 1—or even October 1.
The Tribune and Injustice Watch collaborated on an investigation into Tyler Technologies, which was published on April 6. It further exposed how “Cook County and Illinois agencies have spent a quarter of a billion dollars” on a “flurry of contracts” with the company—far beyond the the initial estimate of $75 million for modernizing court and government computer systems.
“Cook County and state officials approved the cascade of taxpayer dollars to Tyler even as the company struggled with software crashes, bungled rollouts and allegations of incompetence, while Tyler pointed the finger back at government officials for various missteps,” according to the investigation.
The mess created by Tyler and Cook County officials is anticipated to impact thousands of agencies, especially schools and libraries.
Consiglio said that he had dealt with Tyler before. “Many people I know have dealt with this company, and they’ve done nothing but not deliver on their product. So I’m hoping that this delay is only a few months, but I just don’t know.”
“I know [Tyler] did the transition for the judicial court, and it was nothing but a problem and it took a long period of time before they were able to get it operating,” he added.
Consiglio did not expect that this crisis would affect programming at the library until October.
One cultural event planned around Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which the library is excited to host, will cost $1,200. It was in jeopardy until Library Board Trustee Pete Fosco stepped out of the meeting and then returned with a commitment from the Elmwood Park Neighborhood Civic Organization to sponsor the event.
A special meeting with the village will likely take place in the coming weeks. Village and library officials will take the steps necessary to obtain a line of credit and only what the library needs “because of the interest rate.” Consiglio was hopeful that it would be “somewhere less than 5%.”
According to Consiglio, the Government Finance Officers Association recommends that agencies try to have “two or three months of expenses as a reserve. This village never thought that was a good number. But as I stated last month, libraries have the opportunity to write their own fund policy. And a lot of them wrote it for six to nine months.”
Consiglio said that he had talked with Library Board President Chris Pesko at a budget review meeting about preventing something like this from happening. “We’re going to have to figure out some ways that we can accumulate some cash for a reserve for days like this.”
For what it’s worth, Cook County’s contracts with Tyler seem to be the result of everyday political corruption.
“Tyler executives won the company’s first business in Illinois following a series of campaign contributions,” the Tribune and Injustice Watch reported. Then-Clerk of the County Circuit Court Dorothy Brown, along with an “underling,” were under “federal investigation in an unrelated bribery scandal during Tyler’s selection process – although Brown was never charged and denied wrongdoing.”
“And the Supreme Court hired a Tyler executive to be chief of staff overseeing its contract with the company, raising questions about a potential conflict, which the executive denies.”
When the Tribune and Injustice Watch reached out to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Brown, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, “all declined requests for interviews, but through spokespeople said they were working to ensure the Tyler systems were completed and performed as promised.”
But that was several months ago, and now municipalities throughout Cook County are dealing with an unacceptable mess.