Thornton Township Trustees Cancel Tiffany Henyard Events

During a heated meeting Tuesday night, Thornton Township trustees refused to approve events they say encourage reckless spending by Councilwoman Tiffany Henyard, who as a councilwoman and mayor of Dolton is constantly under scrutiny for financial mismanagement.

Henyard railed against trustees Chris Gonzalez, Carmen Carlisle and Gerald Jones for voting to cancel the upcoming Gospel Fest, House Fest and bingo, saying the events took place before their tenure. The board approved the monthly Tech Savvy event, which teaches technical knowledge, with a reduced budget.

“I don't understand why it's a problem now that Tiffany Henyard is the supervisor when it wasn't a problem when Frank Zuccarelli was the supervisor,” Henyard said. “It's the exact same things.”

An ordinance passed by the town council last month requires trustees to approve event budgets before funds are allocated or spent. Henyard scheduled a special meeting for Aug. 29 to similarly approve certain events and amend recently passed ordinances, but no trustees showed up.

Trustees Carlisle and Gonzalez said Tuesday that the township must limit spending because it is operating without an approved budget.

“We can't keep spending money without that being there,” Gonzalez said. “And on top of that, there have been a couple of events here in the last month or so where there's just been an extraordinary amount of money being spent unnecessarily.”

In addition, the trustees again refused to pay invoices for goods and services that they believed were symptomatic of Henyard's excessive spending.

Before the bills were voted on, Henyard asked Carlisle, who had requested the exclusion of the 160 items that she believed were unnecessary to the operation of the municipality, to have each item read aloud to the audience for the sake of transparency.

When Carlisle failed to do so, Henyard demanded the same of Finance Director Robert Hunt, who reported tens of thousands of dollars spent on township credit cards, including at retailers such as Amazon and Walmart, and on services for media and entertainment companies.

“People are just looking for little things they don't want to approve and not doing the right thing,” Henyard said after Hunt read out all the unapproved spending on Tuesday.

Carlisle responded that Henyard's office had failed to comply with a recently passed regulation requiring regular audits of event-related expenses and departments, and that contracts with vendors had not been approved by the board before services were provided.

“We’re not here to try to take anything out,” Carlisle said.

The board voted unanimously to hire attorneys from the Chicago law firm Leinenweber, Daffada and Sansonetti to represent the township in three cases, including a lawsuit filed by a former Dolton Township employee who accuses a township official of having disinterested sex with her after she “blacked out” during a trip to Las Vegas led by the mayor. The lawsuit names Dolton, Henyard and Thornton Township.

The other two cases were brought by former employees Larry Lawrence and Dwayne Thrash, who say they were fired in revenge for not participating in a plan to help Henyard politically, according to civil lawsuits filed in June against Thornton Township, Henyard and former township administrator Keith Freeman.

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Originally published: September 11, 2024 at 11:32 am