E.C. Police Merit Board election undetermined after ballot changes

EAST CHICAGO | Just who will serve on the city's nascent Police Merit Board remained undetermined Thursday after reports that some names were removed from ballots midway through an election of candidates.

Active-duty police officers voted Wednesday on their choices for two seats of the five-member body, which will oversee hiring and promotions in the department based on standardized testing and performance evaluations.

But polling at the James Knight Public Safety Facility was briefly interrupted — and some officers wrongly told the vote had been canceled — before the election resumed with the names of three hopefuls scratched off the ballots, according to members of the East Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 59.

City Attorney Carla Morgan told the Board of Public Safety, which authorized creation of the merit board last year as an anti-patronage and nepotism measure, that those candidates removed from the list were ineligible to serve on the body.

State law requires that merit board members receive no other municipal income, Morgan said, and those redacted, though officially retired from the force, still had money coming to them as part of their retirement package and, thus, were proscribed from running.

Morgan told the safety board that the city did not anticipate any legal challenge to the removals, which would stand up in court.

One of those scratched from the ballot, Richard Medina, a 23-year veteran of the force and City Council member from 2000 until last month, said Thursday that the election was "bogus."

"I turned in my keys, I turned in my police radio on Jan. 31," Medina said. "I retired. And when I came to the Knight center on Wednesday to observe the voting, they wouldn't let me in because they said I wasn't an active-duty officer, I was retired."

Medina and several other officers participated in a new early retirement incentive program for police and firefighters approved by the City Council last month.

That program provides for a lump-sum payment of $50,000 to eligible public safety employees who voluntarily choose not to participate in a state-administered early retirement plan.

City participants have not yet received that $50,000 paycheck, and so do not meet the definition of the state statute regarding candidacy for the merit board, Morgan told safety board members.

"Somebody dropped that ball," Medina said. "What about those officers who voted in the morning; they were disenfranchised."

Medina said he plans to request an investigation from the Board of Public Safety at the next board meeting Feb. 22.

Results from Wednesday's merit board election were not available from Lodge 59 late Thursday.

Neither the City Council, which gets to appoint one member to the merit board under state statute, nor Mayor Anthony Copeland, who gets two appointments, have yet made public their picks.