Mr. Hanewall eyes new opportunity to secretly spend public money

SHOREWOOD, Wis. (Jan. 30, 2006) – Whether he likes it or not, Trustee candidate Jeff Hanewall’s tumultuous tenure as president of the village Library Board offers us an undeniable record that arguably is an indicator of the qualities he would bring, if elected, to the village board.

This is Mr. Hanewall’s second bid for a seat on the municipality’s ruling body; he was narrowly defeated two years ago by Trustee Michael Phinney, who assumed office despite Hanewall’s demand for a recount that the repudiated candidate did not bother to attend.

Mr. Hanewall, employed by a design company, is a philosophical throwback to the days of rule by schmoozing, privileged socialites personified by former Village President Rodney Dow and his minions, intellectual minimalist Trustee Ellen Eckman and the unemployed former trustee and onetime cheerleader, Vida “Boom Boom” Langenkamp. Yet Mr. Hanewall has distinguished himself from the machine mob in one interesting – psychologically, anyway – respect. While Dow, Eckman and Langenkamp have sought influence in village policy matters, Mr. Hanewall’s history suggests an insatiable thirst for power and influence wherever it is available – by appointment or election or default – like a junkie after China White. Unfulfilled, apparently, with being president of the Shorewood Men’s Club and the library board of trustees while also managing concurrently to have himself appointed to a district committee with advisory status to recommend discipline to the state Office of Lawyer Regulation, Mr. Hanewall now wants to be on the Village Board as well. It would be one thing if Mr. Hanewall served one municipal function while participating in design or architectural affairs. But Mr. Hanewall apparently thinks that while his expertise is with paper and pencil – which comes with an eraser – he is the most competent and experienced and insightful person in town to decide how our money should be spent and who should be appointed to which committee he yearns to sit on himself.

While Mr. Hanewall and Mrs. Eckman claimed two years ago to be independent of the Dow-Langenkamp machine and each other as they both ran for trustee, campaign finance reports filed with the village clerk offer irrefutable proof that both candidates were financed by the same group, given equal amounts of funds and utilized the same workers. During a library board meeting last year, Mr. Hanewall demanded to know whether he was being called a liar, and the answer was, and is, "yes."

Like his wife, Pamela Pepper, who volunteered to be on just about every possible legal entity before she was thrust finally into the obscurity of a federal bankruptcy appointment, Mr. Hanewall is a committee geek whose resume is full of appointments but whose credentials show little success in wonkdom.

During his time on the library board, the building was broken into by children of library employees; library fundraising failures required repeated infusions of taxpayer money and a loan that had to be “forgiven” (read that “the library board wouldn’t repay”), money earmarked for use by the village’s seniors citizens was diverted for a library public address system and the library has decided to refuse to make public the details of why thousands of dollars in legal fees were squandered by blurting that the spending of public money by the deeply troubled public institution on legal fees is not the public’s business and the bills are confidential because they are “privileged.”        

As Marquette University ethics professor Daniel C. Maguire points out in a Jan. 30 letter to the New York Times, it is not just President Bush who is “ethically challenged.”

“Our government and citizenry are failing Ethics 101 as they show no awareness of the definition of a lie, and the maxim that a good end does not justify any and every means.”

“A liar is someone who denies the truth to someone who has a right to it,” the professor writes.

To paraphrase the ethicist, “lubricious” terms like “privileged” have “become the ‘ends’ that justify and ‘means,’ even violations of the law and the Constitution.”

“The broad absence of popular outrage,” Maguire writes, “testifies to the general acceptance of these rudimentary ethical errors.”

In his loyal and unwavering allegiance to and defense of the ruling socialites, Mr. Hanewall calls “a nuisance” the 2003 lawsuit over public records, in which the village agreed to stop charging six times the legal amount for copies of public records and to archive official correspondence instead of putting it, as Boom Boom admits, in the blue recycling bin. Meanwhile, more than a year after the lawsuit settlement, Mr. Hanewall’s library board refused to comply with its terms. Mr. Hanewall recently wrote that he intended to destroy all correspondence addressed to him in his official capacity but faxed to his office, which is in violation not only of the settlement agreement but of state law. And if haughty disregard for the law were not enough, Mr. Hanewall refers to this publication, which forced the village to stop swindling citizens on public records charges, as “trash.”

Is Mr. Hanewall ethically bankrupt? We can ask his wife, but if the answer is “yes,” she might not recuse herself anyway.