An appellate court has affirmed a Lake County Court decision in 2024 dismissing charges against Waukegan City Clerk Janet Kilkelly.
The Illinois Appellate Court for the Second District agreed that Kilkelly’s due process rights were violated after she was charged with official misconduct for waiving some city license fees under a COVID-era plan passed by the Waukegan City Council.
“In the present case, the record clearly demonstrates that the State presented deceptive and inaccurate evidence to the grand jury, thereby denying defendant due process,” the appeals court said
Kilkelly had been charged in 2024, but the charges were dismissed in November of that year by Judge Patricia Fix. The judge ruled that an investigator’s misleading testimony to a grand jury, and undefined language in the license fee plan, had compromised the charges against Kilkelly.
Prosecutors appealed, but the 2nd District appellate panel agreed with Fix, who acted within her discretion in dismissing the charges, the justices said in the opinion issued Tuesday.
Kilkelly was charged after the city adopted a resolution waiving some license fees for local businesses during COVID. The fee reduction, the city said, should go to businesses deemed to be in “good standing” with the city, but never defined what constituted good standing.
Illinois State Police investigator David Juergensen, who was investigating Waukegan’s casino-bidding process, led to an investigation of Kilkelly. Juergensen testified before a grand jury that 80 businesses had been improperly granted the fee waivers because they were not in “good standing.”
The appeals court said that issues with the waiver process had been brought out at Kilkelly’s 2024 hearing to dismiss the charges against her.
“The testimony at the hearing established that ‘good standing’ was not defined in the Resolution, by defendant’s colleagues, or in any related documents,” the appeals court said. “Juergensen specifically testified that nothing he observed during his investigation provided a definition of ‘good standing.’ ‘’
At the 2024 dismissal hearing, city officials acknowledged that “good standing” was never defined, but businesses with minor debts to the city would still be considered in good standing.
“It follows that, absent a definition of ‘good standing,’ and thus any meaningful standard by which (Kilkelly) could assess compliance, the State could not prove that (Kilkelly) violated the Resolution,’’ the appeals court said.
Kilkelly and the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
