The Chicago Park District voted Tuesday to release a special counsel report on the “management response” to the burgeoning lifeguard scandal. | Getty
Park Board President Avis LaVelle did not disclose any contents of the report, only that it would be made available later Tuesday. A press conference also is planned.
The Chicago Park District voted Tuesday to release a special counsel report on the “management response” to the burgeoning lifeguard scandal.
The unanimous vote came during a special board meeting dominated by nearly three hours of closed door deliberations.
After those deliberations, Park Board President Avis LaVelle reconvened in public and announced the decision to make a report by attorney Valarie Hays public, with the board voting unanimously to release the report.
LaVelle did not disclose any contents of the report, only that it would be made available — both online and in hard copy — in “an hour or two.” She also planned a press conference for later Tuesday afternoon.
Hays is a former federal prosecutor-turned private attorney hired at $325 an hour to investigate the lifeguard scandal after Park District Inspector Elaine Little was forced to resign in the middle of her internal investigation.
Little, the ex-wife of state Rep. Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, resigned just hours after a WBEZ investigation showed that while overseeing investigations at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, she had an extramarital affair and a child with a colleague. That triggered a conflict of interest probe cut short when she resigned in 2018.
Park District Supt. Mike Kelly also resigned from his $230,000-a-year job last month for mishandling the lifeguard scandal rather than face a public firing. In a brief resignation letter he submitted on a Saturday night, he wrote: “I have always had the best interests of our patrons and our employees at heart.”
Kelly was replaced by City Hall veteran Rosa Escareno, the city’s newly-retired commissioner of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, who’s working under a 90-day contract. Escareno has promised a thorough housecleaning in the Beaches and Pools Division, calling the culture there “disgusting.”
Among the evidence piling up against Kelly was his failure in February 2020 to immediately refer complaints to the Park District’s inspector general, as the Sun-Times reported in August. Instead, he gave first crack at investigating them to his top aides, including one manager whose daughter had been named among the alleged hazers.
One Oak Street Beach lifeguard had emailed 11 pages of heartbreaking, detailed allegations to Kelly about lifeguards’ conduct during the summer of 2019. She said she’d been pushed into a wall, called sexually degrading names by fellow guards and abandoned for hours at her post for refusing to take part in their drinking parties, on-the-job drug use and other frat house-like activities.
Kelly even praised the young woman for her courage in coming forward. But he didn’t forward her complaint to the inspector general — as required by park district rules — until about six weeks later when a second lifeguard’s more graphic complaint of more serious allegations was forwarded to him by Lightfoot’s office.
The investigation also was complicated by the abrupt suspension then firing of Deputy Inspector General Nathan Kipp, who until August led the day-to-day investigation into the lifeguards’ toxic conduct. Kipp has called his ouster a “concerted effort” to prevent him from “continuing to investigate criminal activity and employee misconduct that seemingly pervade” the Beaches and Pools Unit.
