Wendt hasn’t fired her cousin, despite a ruling that he must lose his job
It’s been three weeks since Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Tammy Wendt was ordered to fire her first cousin — a directive she has so far defied, despite a ruling that she “flagrantly” flouted county rules against nepotism.
Wendt’s cousin Todd Thielmann, who joined her office in December 2020 as her top staffer, said in a Thursday phone interview that he was still in the job. The comments came one day after he emailed the Tribune defending his hiring.
“I’m an open book,” Thielmann wrote. “I will continue to manage Commissioner Wendts (sic) staff and do my job until she fires me.”
It was Thielmann’s first statement to the Tribune since the March 10 ruling by the Cook
County Board of Ethics, which fined Wendt $2,000 for violating a county ban on nepotism and ordered her to fire Thielmann.
Wendt has not responded to multiple requests for comment since the ethics board ruling.
The deadline for Wendt to appeal the ethics board decision is April 11. As of Thursday, she had not responded to the ethics board about its finding or paid her fine, said Jennifer King, deputy director at the county’s Department of Human Rights and Ethics.
Wendt, a Democrat from Palos Heights who ousted a Republican incumbent in 2020, filed last month to run for reelection to the property tax appeals board and is expected to face Chicago Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, in the June 28 primary.
But Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin, who filed the original complaint about Wendt, said a new change to the ethics ordinance gives the ethics board more authority.
Should Wendt refuse to heed the ethics board’s ruling, the board can seek a court order to have Thielmann fired, Suffredin said. The ethics board also has more say in approving settlements and imposing fines, under the December changes to the ordinance.
Though there have been spats between the ethics board and elected officials before — former Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios lost a challenge to the ethics board’s ability to sanction him a couple years ago — Suffredin said Wendt’s lack of cooperation is illogical.
“I don’t get it,” Suffredin, a Democrat from Evanston, said. “It
makes no sense to me from a governmental point of view, from a political point of view, from a personal point of view. But obviously, it’s the battle she wants to fight.”
Alisa Kaplan, executive director of Reform for Illinois, noted, “it should not be this hard to get officials to comply with ethics rules.”
“It can be harder to hold elected officials accountable because there’s an assumption that the people are the boss, and if they have a problem with what their official is doing they should throw them out of office,” Kaplan wrote in a statement. “But modern ethics and anti-corruption rules acknowledge that’s not always enough. Officials take on a host of ethical obligations when they take office and agree to accept the consequences for violating them.”
In his email to the Tribune, Thielmann attributed the outrage over his hiring to critics being concerned that “I can’t be bought and I don’t owe anybody anything.”
He pointed a finger at the “hypocrisy” of the two other Board of Review commissioners, Larry Rogers Jr. and Michael Cabonargi, because the latter has also hired Rogers’ cousin.
Cabonargi said Thursday that his hiring of Rogers’ cousin does not violate anti-nepotism rules because the cousin’s employment was with Cabonargi’s office, not Rogers’.
The commissioner called Wendt’s hiring of Thielmann “a stunning abuse of power and disrespect to the taxpayers of Cook County to continue to defy the ethics rules, even after being fined. I guess Donald Trump handed Tammy Wendt the playbook on how to degrade public office.”
Thielmann said that, when he took the job, he did not know all county employees and officials are bound by the Cook County ethics ordinance, which prohibits hiring first cousins.
He said he was only informed of the Board of Review ethics policy, which at the time did not list first cousins under its nepotism ban.
“As a new employee, how was I to know there was some other, overarching ethics policy that would apply?” Thielmann wrote. “I was recruited and hired under a different set of rules. I left a lucrative job in the private sector to come to the public sector in an attempt to help the county taxpayers.”
In his March 10 ruling, ethics board chair Thomas Szromba wrote that Wendt violated a county ban on hiring relatives and failed to uphold her “fiduciary duty” to the county because she was still employing her cousin despite being given several notices about the nepotism ban.
“Wendt has not only violated her fiduciary duty owed to the county, but she has done so in a manner that flagrantly disregards the tenets of government accountability to the public and transparency,” Szromba wrote. “The ethics board finds this particularly troubling as it is clear that Wendt has long been aware of the violation and has taken no steps to rectify it.”
In addition to the ethics board, the Cook County Office of the Independent Inspector General also investigated Thielmann’s hiring. The county watchdog found that Wendt violated the ethics ordinance and should remove her cousin from his post, according to a January report. The inspector general’s office did not publicly name Wendt, but the ethics board ruling confirmed she was the subject of the watchdog’s inquiry.
According to public records, Thielmann was hired in December 2020, immediately after his cousin took office, with a $135,000 salary and received a raise to $150,000 the next month.
But Thielmann said in the email he received that raise because “my number to take the job was always 150k” and that the his smaller starting salary was the result of a “clerical mistake.” He also said he “only took the job after several denials.”
In a previous statement to the Tribune, Wendt — also an attorney who was on the defense team of Jason Van Dyke, the former Chicago officer convicted of murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald — has been unapologetic about her hiring decision.
“This (is) an attempt to silence me . ... I did not hire who was sent to me nor do I owe any political favors,” Wendt said in July 2021.
Thielmann said Thursday he didn’t have knowledge about Wendt’s next steps, though he himself plans to seek legal action if he ends up fired.
“It’s ridiculous to begin with,” he said about the ban on hiring first cousins.