Two days after Christmas, Christopher DeCaigny went to court to challenge a ticket he’d been issued for breaking the city’s garbage-collection law. But DeCaigny insists his real offense is one that’s not mentioned in the city code–messing with the wrong guy.
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Upset at the chamber for trying to raise taxes, DeCaigny and other business owners charged the organization with having violated its bylaws: though board terms were supposed to run two years, board elections hadn’t been held since 1999. Johnson says this hardly seemed like a big deal: few people, he says, have showed much interest in attending the chamber’s meetings, much less serving on the board. The bylaws have been amended to allow the current board to continue to serve.
The bickering between DeCaigny and Johnson continued throughout the year into the summer. In June the dispute got testier. DeCaigny says he was eating at Piazza Bella Trattoria, a restaurant on Roscoe, with Brad Spiess, the vice president of his insurance company, and a few others. “We were talking and an employee of the restaurant came up and said, ‘Chris, the police are here looking for you,’” says Spiess. “Sure enough, we looked outside the window and a police department car was out there.”
On September 30 DeCaigny wrote a letter to the office of attorney general Lisa Madigan, asking for an investigation into the bylaws of the Roscoe Village chamber of commerce, charging that they violate the Illinois Not-for-Profit Act. (Johnson insists that the bylaws have already been cleared by the attorney general’s office.) He also asked the attorney general to “place a freeze on all property and assets of the Chamber” pending “an election of a new [chamber] board” and a “full audit” of its books.”
If it is retribution, it’s not very efficient. Streets and San tickets are delivered through the mail. But the inspector who wrote up Union Insurance used the wrong zip code, so the ticket took over a month to arrive.
Afterward Spiess and Clune stood in the parking lot. “If it was so important, you’d think they’d send someone down to enforce their ticket,” Spiess said. “You know what was going on here. They were just inconveniencing us–sending us another message.”
