Leelanau County was not on the list of recipients of grant funding through the Michigan Public Service Commission’s (MPSC) Renewable Energy and Electrification Infrastructure Enhancement and Development program, which were announced Sept. 26.
Energy Futures Task Force (EFTF) Chairman Joe DeFors, who helped prepare the county’s application for funds through this program, said that MPSC has not yet indicated why the county was not awarded the grant. The Leelanau Enterprise has reached out to the MPSC to see if the decision was related to the public complaints against the task force.
“We’re unable to discuss the selection process for the renewable energy and electrification infrastructure grants,” MPSC Public Information Officer Matt Helms said. “The MPSC will, in the next couple weeks or so, post a full scoring sheet for all the applications we received.”
The county applied for $1.5 million from the MPSC to build solar arrays at the government center in Suttons Bay in February. While waiting for a response, opponents of the project shifted the narrative from the solar array project by making criminal allegations against the people who prepared it.
A Northport resident alleged in March that the task force was not posting meeting notices and minutes to push through the project through behind closed doors. His complaint resulted in a Michigan State Police (MSP) investigation.
DeFors said County Commissioner Gwenne Allgaier was sworn in as their secretary and recorded minutes of their meetings. He said that notices and minutes for several meetings were submitted to the county clerk, but they were not posted by the clerk’s office due to a “snafu.”
“Nobody was running away from obligations, shirking away from responsibility, or trying to avoid transparency,” DeFors told the newspaper Monday.
New information has come to light since this investigation. Government documents show that Allgaier emailed minutes from several EFTF meetings to the clerk’s office within days of the respective meetings, but they were not posted online until spring 2024.
Allgaier emailed the minutes to the county clerk, Michelle Crocker. Crocker then instructed Deputy Clerk Allison Middleton to proofread them for errors. The clerk’s office collected the minutes in a folder in their office, which was made available to others on request, but did nothing else with them.
In late February, if not earlier, the clerk’s office was aware that EFTF documents were not being posted on the county website in compliance with the Michigan Open Meetings Act. Despite this, the issue was still unresolved weeks later, meaning some government staff were aware of the potential violation for months while it went unaddressed.
On Feb. 21, Middleton emailed Allgaier asking where the group’s meeting notices were being posted. Allgaier replied that she “assumed Michele (sic) was ‘posting’ them somewhere” the next day.
This exchange shows both the clerk’s office and the EFTF thought the other party was responsible for posting the meeting notices. The email chain appears to have stopped there with no further attempts by either side to resolve the confusion.
Both Crocker and Allgaier maintain that it was not the clerk’s responsibility to post EFTF meeting notices and minutes. But the fact remains that the clerk’s office was aware that they weren’t being posted.
“We did publish the task force’s first notice (of their Oct. 5 meeting), but not subsequent meetings, because when they (the county board) made the motion to create this task force, they said no county expenses were to be used at all,” Crocker said Wednesday.
Crocker means that clerk’s office staff should not be uploading anything from the EFTF since they were government employees, and the task force was not to run on county money. Despite this, Middleton was still proofreading minutes and following up on documents the office didn’t receive.
The newspaper asked Crocker and Middleton if they reported this possible legal violation to anyone in the administrative department or other elected officials after this email exchange with Allgaier. They said they were “talking about it” around this time, but when asked follow-up questions, they could not identify the people they spoke with or their general responses to the problem.
In any case, they said that these conversations did not leave a paper trail. Documentation picks up again a few weeks later when a citizen visited the clerk’s office to express his concerns about the EFTF not publicly posting their meeting minutes and notices.
The issue still wasn’t resolved between late February and the EFTF’s monthly meeting on March 7. This inaction led to an MSP investigation. Soon after the clerk met with the resident, he filed a complaint with the county prosecutor alleging that the EFTF was violating state laws.
Middleton said that the clerk’s office would have shared all their documents on the EFTF, making the complaintant aware the clerk’s office was receiving minutes but not uploading them. When the newspaper went to ask the resident about what happened Tuesday, he declined to speak with the paper.
The Leelanau Enterprise asked Crocker and Middleton if they tried to resolve the issue internally by letting other staff and elected officials know that a resident was concerned about missing meeting minutes and notices before they were visited by a state trooper. They said they did not remember.
Months later, upon reviewing findings from the MSP investigation, the county prosecutor’s office concluded the meeting notices and minutes were not posted due to an error and decided that it was “not appropriate” to prosecute it. Crocker, Middleton, and the county’s Interim Administrator Richard Lewis agreed that the issue could’ve been handled better.
Lewis added that all this happened before he joined the county as interim administrator. Since then, the county’s administrative department has assumed the responsibility of uploading the meeting notices and minutes in collaboration with the clerk’s office and EFTF.
Not long after the MSP investigation concluded, new allegations against the task force surfaced. In June, at least 10 other citizens requested the county open an “ethical violation investigation” into DeFors and commissioners Allgaier and Kama Ross, who are also EFTF members. They did not call for an investigation into the third commissioner on the task force, Melinda Lautner, however.
The county board appeared to agree at their June executive session that they would not investigate DeFors’s conflict of interest further unless the county receives the MPSC grant. DeFors says that Leelanau County was not one of the 12 organizations awarded funds. If another organization backs out before Nov. 15, the solar panel project may receive funds instead. DeFors said the chances of this happening are “slim.”
