A woman identifying herself as Patty Lesch of Northport approached the board during public comment at its May 21 meeting to call for officials to conduct an “ethical violation investigation” into Joe DeFors, chair of the county’s Energy Futures Task Force, for allegedly “seeking personal gain in his position.”
Lesch was referencing an application for grant dollars to install solar arrays at the government center campus in Suttons Bay, which was prepared for the county by task force members. In the application’s budget narrative, DeFors and task force member Russ Packard are listed as sharing a $45 hourly salary for an estimated three hours of work per week as the project’s “leadership team.”
Citing the county’s conflict of interest policy, Lesch requested the board chairman open an investigation into DeFors. She also accused commissioners Kama Ross and Gwenne Allgaier of being “complicit with the ethical violation” and said they should recuse themselves from the investigation. Ross and Allgaier are members of the task force.
A third commissioner, Melinda Lautner, requested that the task force be expanded from a 12-member to a 14-member body so that she could be among the members appointed in September. Unlike Ross and Allgaier, Lautner is a Republican. Lesch did not mention that Lautner should also recuse herself from any such investigation.
The newspaper was unable to reach DeFors for comment between the Tuesday night meeting and going to the presses last week. He responded to the allegations earlier this week.
According to DeFors, the leadership team consisting of himself and Packard was proposed to help the project’s manager communicate with the network of individuals and organizations they built while completing the grant application. According to the application, this network is anticipated “to be called upon during the actual construction and implementation of the project.”
“The work on developing and submitting this application took roughly five months (and) some 20 or more different resources were called upon at various points in that process. Some of them are state agencies, others are organizations, others were individuals,” DeFors said.
“In conceiving the project management structure, we thought it made some sense that if it were necessary to get back to some of these resources, since we are a known quality to them, we should make ourselves available to make those contacts,” he continued.
DeFors noted that the “main, central figure” of the project would not be himself, but the project manager. This is partly reflected in the budget narrative, as the project manager is to be paid more with a $50 hourly salary for 10 hours of work per week. DeFors also said he may not receive any money if the grant is approved, since his salary is based on what is “required by project needs.”
“(Packard and I) are in the leadership structure only on an ‘on call’ basis. If the resources and network we generated is useful to the project manager, he can call upon us if he wants to and we’ll help him get in touch with the necessary resources. But he may never call. It’s no certainty that we’ll be compensated at all for this project because of that ‘on call’ basis,” DeFors said.
Although Packard says that he understands why some people may view this as a conflict of interest, he said he doesn’t believe it is. He said that situations like these are relatively common in local government because committees or task forces are often made up of area residents. For example, the members of a planning commission are often property owners in the community.
“The mere fact of a conflict going on is not in itself unusual or concerning. What could be concerning is how that conflict might be used. The key points to answering that question are: was it divulged voluntarily and publicly? Yes. Was a conflict of interest used to benefit the individual surreptitiously? No. And finally, was the presence of the conflict used in any way at all in a way that did harm to the public body? And again, the answer is no,” DeFors said. Lesch’s comments at the board of commissioners’ meeting were repeated verbatim in an email to the Leelanau Enterprise by Gary Hosking. Hosking had filed a complaint against the Task Force in March alleging that the task force violated the Michigan Open Meetings Act (OMA).
The accusations that were made at the board’s May regular session came barely a week after the county’s legal counsel, Cohl, Stoker, & Toskey, P.C., advised the board of commissioners that the task force is not subject to the OMA because they lacked “decision-making authority,” citing a 2022 Michigan Court of Appeals case.
Although this county lawyer argues that there was no violation, the Michigan State Police (MSP) confirmed they were investigating the complaint as of May 13. On Wednesday morning, MSP Specialist Lieutenant Derrick Carroll told the newspaper that the investigation was “pretty much wrapped up,” and in his opinion, “it probably isn’t going anywhere.” However, he said the MSP will send a report to the prosectuing attorney’s office, who will review the investigation’s findings and decide whether to file criminal charges.
DeFors says that even if the task force is not required to do so, the 14-member body has been keeping its meetings open to the public and taking minutes “as a courtesy and for the purpose of transparency.” Although the task force’s meeting notices and minutes were not posted between October and March, DeFors said they corrected this when it was brought to their attention.
DeFors requested that “if folks really have concerns or feel opposition to clean energy, let’s have that discussion, rather than attacking (the task force) through this mudslinging.” DeFors said Lesch and Hosking did not speak to him about their concerns before making their complaints to other bodies. He also said that he has not been contacted by Leelanau County officials or state police.
The grant application also garnered some controversy when it was presented at the county board’s February meetings. As DeFors noted to the newspaper, the initial proposal was changed to relocate a solar array further away from the veteran’s memorial, as “some thought it was too close to the veteran’s memorial and detracted from the respectfulness of the setting.”
The county board approved the application by a 4-3 vote along party lines at their Feb. 20 meeting, with the Republican commissioners voting no. Some concerns cited by these commissioners were alleged ties between the solar panel’s manufacturer and “the Chinese,” and the proximity of an array to the county jail, as school field trips may visit there for educational purposes.
“Honestly, it’s very hard for me to understand opposition to a project like this. We’re bringing over a million dollars of capital investment into the county. We’re going to save tens of thousands of dollars a year on electric costs. We’re going to burn less fossil fuels, and we’re going to use freely available and infinite energy from the sun,” DeFors said.
