The Caseyville Village Board Wednesday will consider filling the vacant hotel inspector position for the second time in the past 15 months. The departure of the previous hotel inspector, John Aiple, was the subject of a local sensational news story at the time.
Caseyville Village Hall / Photo by Roger Starkey
On June 12, 2013, the newly elected mayor of Caseyville was making changes. One of his first moves, the news story indicated, was to rid the village of a $55,000 per year hotel inspector.
“You can tell by what I’m telling you that there’s a lot of changes coming and a lot of money being saved,” Leonard Black was quoted as telling his audience at a meeting on that date.
Those in attendance were shocked at how much the man made. To make it worse, he was getting retirement and no one in Village Hall even knew him.
One flabbergasted audience member asked for how long this mysterious man had been getting paid to inspect hotel rooms.
“Who knows,” Black is reported to have replied.
The mystery man did not even have a boss, Black said.
“You couldn’t ask for a better job than that, come and go as you please,” the recently elected mayor reportedly said.
It was an interesting story. Unfortunately, it was more fiction than fact.
The mystery man was John Aiple, who had worked for Caseyville for 13 years and was a well-known figure in Village Hall. He never made $55,000 and, in fact, made less money than Black in 2011 when Black was the Village Clerk.
Aiple was surprised when rumors began to spread that he was receiving such a large salary and it was implied that he was not working hard, but it was difficult for him to set the record straight.
“Nobody contacted me to ask if any of it was true or for my side of the story,” Aiple said.
There was no public meeting of trustees on June 12, 2013, as the story indicated, current Village Clerk Rob Watt said. Although Watt has not provided The Metro Independent a final response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted 91 days ago asking for a recording of the June 5, 2013 meeting — by law, a response to a FOIA request must be submitted within five business days. Some situations allow a five business day extension — he did provide the meeting minutes, which make no mention of any of the items the story attributes to the June 12, 2013 meeting.
Aiple’s dismissal and Black’s claim that the hotel inspector was a $55,000 mystery man may have taken place at the June 5, 2013, meeting, despite the lack of documented evidence. There are multiple discrepancies between the recorded minutes of the June 19, 2013 meeting and the audio recording of the meeting. Therefore, without a recording, a conclusion of the meeting’s contents cannot be drawn conclusively.
The Metro Independent received a recording of the June 19, 2013 regular board meeting through a FOIA request. Among other meeting minute discrepancies found were the appointment of village attorneys John Gilbert and the Law Office of Christopher Cueto, Ltd. Trustee Kerry Davis informed Gilbert and the Board that the Illinois Municipal Code indicates that the village attorney has to be approved by the Board. The village attorneys had previously been appointed by Black without Board approval.
At Gilbert’s suggestion, Kerry made a motion to approve Gilbert and the Cueto firm. The Board unanimously approved the motion. The several minute conversation took place during an agenda item for appointments to the Planning Commission. The official meeting minutes for that agenda item state, “(n)o questions on the motion.” The minutes do not reflect the conversation, the vote or an agenda item to appoint village attorneys.
There is no record from June 2013 of the Board voting to remove Aiple. Because his appointment was approved by the Board in 2000, his removal had to be carried out with the approval of the Board.
“It would have to be approved by the Board,” Black said in a recent interview. “I don’t know why it wasn’t.”
How the story about Aiple making $55,000 began is a mystery. Black recently told The Metro Independent that he uncovered the staggering pay for a man who did nothing but hotel inspections.
“I found that out after I was mayor and started going over the records,” Black said. “Everybody I talk to, nobody knows how he got that much.”
According to the story about Black shaking things up, he was going to cut the cost of the hotel inspect in half. Aiple, at the time of the purported statement, made less than half of the claimed $55,000.
According to Aiple’s paystubs, obtained by The Metro Independent through a FOIA request, he earned $25,585 during his final 12 months of employment. Aiple earned $7,365 in 2011, the same year Black earned $10,800 as Village Clerk.
“Maybe I got bad information,” Black said. “I don’t know where I got that figure.”
Nor is it clear how Aiple became a “mysterious man” with a job that no one knew existed. The six current Board of Trustees members, who were also members in June 2013, said they knew Aiple before he received a letter from Black informing him that his services were no longer needed.
Black said he did not know Aiple.
“All the years I was here, four years as the clerk, I never met him,” Black said recently.
Aiple said he met Black many times while Black was clerk, usually in a break area in Village Hall where the two would engage in small talk.
“He was aware of who I was and he was aware of my position,” Aiple said.
Another mystery is how Aiple became known as the hotel inspector when that was but one aspect of his job. Under the direction of Zoning Administrator Paul McNamara, Aiple inspected commercial property in Caseyville and any other property that was of concern to the Village due to its poor condition.
Aiple’s pay jumped to $25,585 in the last 12 months of his employment with Caseyville when he began inspecting hotel rooms twice each year, instead of one time, he said. Trustee Wally Abernathy said the increase came after Caseyville received complaints about the hotels.
“We were hosting a baseball tournament and part of the deal we made with the organizers was that the teams had to stay in Caseyville hotels,” Abernathy said. “After one night, all of the teams moved to hotels out of town because they said our hotels were in poor condition.”
In the 15 months that Caseyville has not had a hotel inspector, the properties are only inspected when a complaint is received, and the number of complaints has increased, Abernathy said.
“We are getting a lot of complaints about how filthy they are,” Abernathy said of the hotels at an Aug. 20, 2014 Board meeting.
On Wednesday, the Board will consider replacing Aiple for the second time. The agenda item was tabled the only other time it appeared as an agenda item since June 2013.
The previous inspector has moved on. After retiring as chief engineer from a local Holiday Inn, Aiple began a career as an independent inspector.
