After nearly a year of requesting receipts for expenses incurred by or at the request of Mayor Thaddeus Jones, all seven Calumet City aldermen voted Monday to take legal action to receive documentation for $76,000 of spending.
“We’re just asking questions, really,” 3rd Ward Ald. DeAndre Tillman said Wednesday. “It didn’t have to come to this.”
Since Jones racked up $44,000 on a city credit card in September, much of which was during the Congressional Black Caucus’ 54th annual legislative conference in Washington, aldermen say they have regularly requested documentation tying expenses to city business. The mayor no longer possesses the credit card, but the City Council is still without the receipts, despite hiring its own legal counsel in December.
Tillman said he was inspired to take look deeper into Jones’ spending after the mayor promised to reimburse the city for $25,000 spent during the Washington conference. The check Jones provided came from a local business that already owed the city the money, he said.
“No council member was happy with that — it felt like a blatant lie,” Tillman said. “If a person is that desperate to try to get this swept under the rug, what else is out there?”
Meanwhile, Jones said he sent aldermen the requested receipts in July and the City Council vote “is about politics.” He forwarded pages of receipts for 2024 and 2025 as well as “non-receipt justification statements” for items without them.
“They got the receipts, and they got everything,” Jones said. “They just want to continue this so you keep reporting on it.”
He said the City Council approving his past expenses “just shows that they’re part of it too.” Aldermen say much of the spending they’re questioning was unauthorized.
Aldermen plan to meet again on Sept. 8 to select an independent firm to represent them in litigation against Jones.
Calumet City has operated in budget deficits ranging from $2.8 million to $4.7 million since 2023, with the City Council in June agreeing to a 5-year bond to pay more than $8 million in overdue bills. The city also laid off 46 people, including 13 union public works employees, May 22.
2nd Ward Ald. Monet Wilson says she understands that suing the mayor will further cost taxpayers but believes residents, along with other aldermen, have grown more concerned about city spending over time.
While Jones has said wasteful spending is not responsible for large budget deficits, Wilson countered that “when taxpayer money is spent, every dollar has to be accounted for.”
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“It all adds up when we have storms like we’ve had and we have had people have their basements flooded, their alleys flooded, their garages flooded, trapped in their homes by falling trees — and we just don’t have the money to fix it immediately,” Wilson said.
She said when a resident questioned whether Wilson was calling the mayor a criminal, she made clear that is not the City Council’s intention.
“But we do want to be able to have checks and balances, and we just want to hold him accountable,” she said.
The mayor holds that the City Council’s attorney, Evergreen Park-based firm Odelson, Murphey, Frazier & McGrath, cannot represent the city in ongoing proceedings, which is the subject of a lawsuit he brought.
Judge Alison Conlon denied the firm’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit earlier this month, with the next hearing in the case scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on Sept. 3 at the Richard Daley Center in Chicago.
“The Council don’t have the authority to investigate me, and they don’t have the legal authority to make the motion that they made,” Jones said.