Wheatland Residents Fear Legal Battle Akin to Grafton Township Case

Grafton Township Supervisor Linda Moore’s voice had a dull ring of resignation when she answered the phone Wednesday morning. 

On her desk, she said, was a $20,000 check written to the Ancel Glink law firm that she’d just signed, putting the total amount of legal fees the McHenry County-based township has paid to the firm at $313,000. 

Moore only had a minute to talk. She was due in court for another round in the “seemingly endless” litigation between Grafton Township and Ancel Glink, which writes educational handbooks for township officials. 

“It just doesn’t make sense that Township Officials of Illinois continue to use (Ancel Glink) to educate township officials after everything we’ve been through with them,” she said. 

And they're not the only ones. Ancel Glink is the firm that advises the Wheatland Township Board, which right now is dealing with a group of residents who want to see the board reconsider plans for a new $1.5 million township hall building.

Moore has been embroiled in a court battle with the firm since she was elected in 2009, put in office after a citizen uprising against the township board's plans to build a township hall. In Grafton and Wheatland, the attorney involved was Ancel Glink partner Keri-Lyn Krafthefer.

Despite the legal battle — which the presiding judge has described as "blood sport" — the legal bills just keep mounting, Moore said.

"I think you’ve got a real problem when you bring in Ancel Glink,” she said. “They're not working for the good of the people. They're working of the good of their own pocketbook.” 

Grafton Township isn’t representative of the firm’s township clients, Krathefer said in an e-mailed response to questions from Plainfield Patch. 

“If you talk to the supervisors in the other 35 townships we represent, instead of the one we just defeated in a case, you will learn that we have billed nominal attorneys fees to them,” she said. 

Grafton Township is in Huntley. Gloria Casas, editor of the Huntley Patch, calls the Moore-Krafthefer saga “as good as reality TV.” 

Wheatland residents fear the battle brewing over the new township hall is going to be a repeat of what happened in Grafton. Plainfield resident Chuck Miller is one of them. 

“The same thing is about to happen here,” he said. 

During the past two years, Wheatland Township has paid Ancel Glink more than $32,000 in legal bills. A drop in the bucket compared to Grafton's litigation tab but far more than the $2,300 the township paid to its last law firm — Mahoney, Silverman and Cross of Joliet — between April 2008 and July 2009, records show.

The township's 2009-10 budget allocated $1,000 for legal fees and another $5,000 under capital expenses for the new building. By 2010-11, the legal budget had increased to $12,000. 

A citizen group opposed to building a town hall without more information on the costs and other options petitioned for a special town meeting at last month’s annual town meeting. The group is consulting with its attorneys on the meeting's agenda because members say they don't trust Krafthefer.

“I’m very upset that my tax money goes to pay their (Ancel Glink’s) salary while they force my hand to hire another attorney,” group representative Deb Holscher told Plainfield Patch last month. 

In her e-mail, Krafthefer said no Wheatland township taxpayers have told her they don’t trust her to represent their interests.  

“However, I do not represent any individual taxpayers in Wheatland Township,” she said. “I represent the township and the interests of the township, not individual taxpayers.”

Township Clerk Chuck Kern publicly challenged advice Krafthefer gave at the April 12 annual town meeting, calling it “misinformation.” Holscher said she believes it was geared to support the township board members who support the new building.

“I don’t know if it was inadvertent or just misinformation, but it was noted by quite a few as inaccurate,” Kern said at April’s board meeting. “I was very disappointed.” 

There also are questions being raised over the money Ancel Glink has contributed to the Wheatland Township Republican Organization. It donated $3,000 to the group when Todd Morse was its chairman, and this year gave $1,000 to Morse campaign fund, campaign disclosure records show. Morse was elected supervisor in 2009.

“It kind of has the smell of pay-to-play,” Holscher said. 

Five years ago, Moore was in a role not unlike Holscher’s. 

After Grafton Township citizens started voicing opposition to a planned $3 million township hall, McHenry County Circuit Judge Michael Caldwell ruled the new building wasn’t legally sanctioned. Moore campaigned on an anti-building platform and ousted Supervisor John Rossi in 2009.  

In that round, trustees spent $88,000 on attorney’s fees to defend the new town hall, according to a summary of fact in an opinion Caldwell penned in December. Ancel Glink did not represent the trustees in that court case, Krafthefer said. 

But that was the “genesis” of the separation of powers case, Grafton Township v. Linda Moore, the judge wrote. The board wanted to retain Ancel Glink while Moore wanted them replaced by a new attorney.

Moore prevailed in that case, when Caldwell’s ruling in December in effect allowed Moore to fire both the township administrator and Ancel Glink. 

“What was done here by this board to the supervisor was not a policy but rather a deliberate usurpation of the supervisor’s authority and a clear case of unnecessary meddling and illegal micromanaging,” Caldwell said.

But Krafthefer holds she won.

“We recently won a significant victory on behalf of our clients in Grafton Township against Linda Moore,” her e-mail said.  

When Caldwell issued his opinion, Krafthefer told reporters the firing of the township administrator and Krafthefer’s law firm were “two minor issues,” and she won her effort to continue representing the trustees, according to reports in the McHenry County Blog. 

Caldwell ordered trustees to approve Moore’s appointment of John Nelson as township attorney, but he stayed the order for 30 days. 

Attorney Thomas DiCianni, the Ancel Glink partner representing the trustees, vowed to appeal.

“So it goes on,” Moore said. “And the bills just keep adding up.”