Phone records show auditor rarely in office
URBANA — A review of the telephone records of elected countywide officials shows that Champaign County Auditor Tony Fabri made only 18 phone calls in the last year from his personal office number.
The other seven countywide officials made between 2,318 and 251 calls from their office phones during the same period, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The phone records lend credence to complaints at the county government’s Brookens Administrative Center that Fabri — already accused two years ago of poor attendance — has been missing from work for several months.
The most recent call from his office phone number was made on Jan. 11. Of the 18 calls made from Fabri’s desk phone in the 12-month period, the greatest number — five — were to Tom Betz, the Urbana Democrat who is vice chairman of the county board. Among the others was one to the WDWS-AM studio line, one to the Illinois attorney general’s office and another to the IRS.
Because county officials do not fill out time sheets, punch in at a time clock or otherwise leave a record of their attendance, examining phone records is virtually the only way to assess an officeholder’s presence at work.
Fabri’s chief deputy, Carol Wadleigh, declined to answer questions about his absence from work. Wadleigh is a certified public accountant who has worked in the office since 1980.
In an emailed response to questions about his absence, Fabri said only that “phone records aren’t an accurate reflection of time spent working.
“It’s true I’m not always in the office. It’s also true I’m performing the duties of county auditor, with a record of accomplishments I’m proud of.”
He did not address the issue of his absences, or explain the dearth of phone calls from his office.
Several county officials say, however, that they have not seen Fabri at work, at county board meetings or at the monthly meetings of county department heads.
“It’s an embarrassment,” said county board member Brendan McGinty, an Urbana Democrat who is chair of the board’s finance committee. “The problem has been so obvious for so long that it has to be disheartening to the employees who have to endure our inability as a county to give significant increases, to be understaffed in some cases and yet to still have obvious waste in this case.”
Fabri’s current salary is $83,007. However, rather than impose a 6 percent budget cut on the auditor’s office this year, Fabri voluntarily agreed to pay $15,000 of his salary into the county’s general fund, essentially making his salary $68,007. County records show, however, that he has yet to repay any of the $15,000.
The county’s fiscal year is more than half over.
Fabri honored a similar commitment last year, rather than cutting his office budget. His salary last year was $79,815, but the $15,000 payment to the county reduced his pay to $64,815.
Even so, McGinty said that with “fully loaded benefits, he’s got to be getting six figures.”
There is little that county board members can do, he said, because Fabri is an independently elected official.
“We could verbally reprimand him, but there’s not a single thing that we can do to force him out of office. The voters have to do that,” McGinty said.
Fabri’s current four-year term expires in December 2012.
In one case, several county officials said Fabri couldn’t be located to sign a memorandum of understanding with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees regarding an employee in the auditor’s office. The memorandum to the AFSCME general bargaining unit contract is posted on the county’s website with a blank line where Fabri’s signature is supposed to be.
“He’s absolutely stealing from the county,” said Champaign Republican Alan Nudo, who heads the 12-member GOP caucus on the board. “What we can do is to affect his budget, and maybe he’ll take another pay cut. That’s the only thing you can do. If he’s a person with a conscience he’ll do what he did before and lower his salary. Quite frankly he knew he wasn’t earning it.”
County Board Chairman C. Pius Weibel, a Champaign Democrat, did not dispute the contentions that Fabri has been largely missing from his job.
“I have no data to disagree with what you’re saying,” he said. “But all we can do is bark, and you know how successful that’s been.”
In March 2009, The News-Gazette reported that phone records indicated that Fabri missed more than half his workdays in the previous year.
He said at the time that he works “a full-time job” and that phone records were not an accurate way of accounting for his time spent on the job. “I rarely use my desk phone,” he said at the time. “So to say that a day when I don’t use my desk phone is a day that I’m not at work is just not accurate at all.”
Following The News-Gazette story, Fabri stepped down as chairman of the Champaign County Democratic Party, an unpaid position, but stayed on as county auditor.
County Treasurer Dan Welch, a Republican whose office at the Brookens Center is close to Fabri’s, said he last saw the auditor at a county board meeting months ago.
“The least he could do is show up, just show up. He could at least sit in there and play solitaire,” Welch said. “If someone comes by my office with a complaint, I want to be the guy who takes the complaint. I don’t want my staff to take complaints from somebody. I should be the guy taking it.”
Welch said Fabri missed a county department heads meeting last month, attended by more than 30 people, where all top county officials were given instructions on planning for this year’s budget-making process.
“We’re supposed to turn that in by July 15th,” Welch said. “Tony wasn’t there, Carol (Wadleigh) wasn’t there either. I don’t know if anyone is representing that office. If I go back further, the thing that concerns me is that when we went through all those budget cuts, he wasn’t in those meetings. We had department heads and elected officials meetings where we were talking about budget cuts, but he didn’t participate.”
Meanwhile, one of the chief duties of the auditor’s office — preparation of the county’s annual Comprehensive Annual Financial Report — is behind schedule.
The document was due June 1. Wadleigh, whose pay of $83,311 is slightly higher than Fabri’s, said “it is still in progress and we’re hoping to be able to issue it at the end of (this) week.”
Asked about the delay, Wadleigh attributed it to “a myriad of things,” including the fact that the county has a new independent auditing firm doing the annual review.
Fabri, in his emailed statement, said he “requested and was granted a 60-day deadline extension from the Illinois comptroller’s office. That deadline doesn’t arrive until the end of this month. I fully expect to meet that deadline and have every hope this year’s CAFR will be recognized for excellence by the (Government Financial Officers Association), just like last year’s CAFR and the ones before it.”
Office calls
(Outgoing calls made from individual office desk phones by elected Champaign County officials between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2011)
Sheriff Dan Walsh 2,318
Recorder Barb Frasca 1,625
County Clerk (Mark Shelden and Gordy Hulten) 1,106
Circuit Clerk Linda Frank 825
State’s Attorney Julia Rietz 679
Treasurer Dan Welch 251
Auditor Tony Fabri 18
MoreMoreThe short answer to your question: The people are Fabri's boss. It was during the last election that voters were given the choice to vote on whether or not the position of auditor is to remain an elected office, or to give the county the power to appoint an auditor. The people who voted on this chose to keep the office of county auditor an elected position. So, at this point, it's up to the people to find a suitable candidate who can challenge Fabri in the next election. This, of course, is assuming that he will choose to run again.
The local blog "halfway interesting" has an interesting article regarding selecting a new candidate for the position.
http://halfwayinteresting.com/Pages/ChampaignCounty/tabid/89/entryid/558...
As the NG article has pointed out, no one at the county building is expected to fill out time-sheets or punch a clock to indicate when they are working. Mr. Fabri has denied slacking on the job in the past, and the people quoted in the article aren't always there during the daytime themselves. Most county board members work full-time jobs outside of their own responsibilities, so it's hard to say they are credible sources on this. They can really only comment on his attendance, or lack thereof, at board meetings.
I tend to be somewhat skeptical of the reporting by the NG, since they have a history of looking for reasons to criticize office holders they don't like. I also remember when the State Attorneys spouse managed to lose his gun in Cherry Hills, yet the NG chose to withhold his name until his wife was safely re-elected. I guess they didn't want the information to potentially hinder her chances at re-election.
Since Fabri will be up for re-election at some point, my suggestion would be to look at the possibility of electing someone else to the position. This would entail finding someone who is willing to let being the auditing position be his/her only full-time job.
Setting aside the sarcasm of your post: I briefly noted finding a candidate who would be willing to make the office of auditor a full-time job. Mr. Jones did not effectively make the case in his campaign that he is better suited to the position, hence he lost the election. It was also put to a vote recently to keep the office of the auditor as an elected position. The voters made the choice to not give the board the power the appoint an auditor. The voters are the ones who make the decisions regarding who holds this office. Unfortunately, voter turnout in local/regional elections is usually not as strong as national elections.
As other comments here have noted, phone records of land line calls are not the best measurement of how well a person is doing his/her job. One of the things you suggested, was looking at the email activity from his office. The only thing I would have reservations about in regards to asking for email records is how that can impact the work of other elected officials. Both Gordy Hulten and Julia Rietz handle sensitive information in their respective positions, and it may not serve the public interest to have some of their records released.
The number of emails sent during a certain time period without information about the content or recipients would not reveal any sensitive information.
There are good reasons to keep the auditor office elected, rather than appointed. The auditor serves a watchdog role and may need to tell county board members or other officials that they can't do something. That's why there was bipartisan support for keeping the office elected.
I'm not sure what the comment about the police officer's lost gun over two years ago had to do with Tony Fabri. In fact, it sounded like it was basically a gratuitous attack on the N-G and Julia Rietz. He lost the gun Thursday night and reported it to the police, who searched for it over the weekend. CPD put out a press release Monday or Tuesday, and the N-G printed it. Not seeing any wrongdoing or conspiracies there.
Hi wayward:
Here is the portion of my original post where I criticized the News-Gazette.
"I tend to be somewhat skeptical of the reporting by the NG, since they have a history of looking for reasons to criticize office holders they don't like."
So yes, I did criticize the NG, and the exemplar I used had to do with the history of the lost firearm. This seemed appropriate because the NG article made reference to their history of similar reports on Fabri. Now, I know from your own history of posts on IlliniPundit that you are very supportive of Julia Rietz, and I can certainly understand why you have found my use of this particular example offensive. Perhaps you might not have reacted the same way if I had used more recent examples such as the NG making reference to the Schweighart YouTube comments as a "Faux Controversy", or their article criticizing Mayor Gerard for not engaging in a sit-down interview with the NG as he was preparing for office. Would you care to label those examples as "gratuitous" in nature?
People who work in the media, and who run for a specific office, often find that they need to develop a thick skin. Being on the receiving end of criticism is part of the job, and many people who are communication professionals and politicians know better than to take anything that is written personally. This is where a certain element of detachment can come in quite handy. I would say that this is something that the NG does understand, since the online editors do not make it a habit of deleting posts that criticize their editorials or articles.
Peace, Marti :)
Well, I would have considered Schweighart's birther comments and Gerard declining a N-G interview to be equally irrelevant, given that the story was about Tony Fabri. Other posters did a better and more succinct job of pointing out the limitations of the article when they noted that the number of calls made on a landline wasn't necessarily a good measure of job performance in 2011.
I don't know about the rest of the world, But in my job, I have a set of goals that are set at the start of every fiscal year. I am have to speak to those goals and show what I have done to achieve them.
Looks like we need to set some goals and have those we have elected speak to them.
This should be a matter of public record. If we do not have any expectation other than a set amount of phone calls, then instead of raising taxes, we should eliminate the waste.
Ask anyone in the office and they can tell you what is going on. Looks like people are speaking up, we need to listen.
You know what is just downright hilarious about this whole situation? Fabri stood in front of the county board and SUGGESTED that they do away with his current position. He DEMONTRATED to them, that the position is really not needed since someone else does 99% of the work in the office.
Then he was appointed to the spot and started gettin paid, and he came to realize the importance of the job. Not the importance to you and I and other taxpayers, but to himself. In the end, his complete lack of work ethic SUGGESTS that he was right in the first place. He is DEMONSTRATING that he, and his job, are both worthless to taxpayers.
Seriously, why does a position that clearly requires less than what might normally be considered "part time" hours need a chief deputy? Is that to do the work that Fabri doesn't?? I guarantee you that there are hundreds of other EQUALLY QUALIFIED candidates in the county who would be happy to put in 40 hour weeks.
Article Title: "Phone records show auditor rarely made phone calls from his office"
There, fixed that for you. This article and what it presumed was ridiculous. I work full-time and can promise that I've made fewer than three or four phone calls (all of which were business-related) from my office phone last year. That proves nothing.
Gee.... with very few phone calls, not signing in or out at work, and not being available to the public; the guy sounds like State of Illinois administrators, and managers. Thank goodness that he has front line workers to depend on like they do. Well, he was elected by the people so not much can be done until the next election. I am sure that the public will vote for another politician to replace him.
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