Claims vs. the record.

The Village's own FOIA production complicates the framing: Mayor LaMore signed a written "Call for Special Meeting" for June 25 (hand-dated June 23) listing the audit, Gotion, and "articulation of reason for removal of Cainkar." Trustee Gesky then asked in writing (11:53 a.m., June 23) to add the reinstatement motion; the administrator replied "Will do," and the agenda went out at 4:31 p.m. carrying it. The live legal question is narrower than "no meeting was called": whether Village Code § 1-6-3's clerk-notice steps were followed, and whether trustees could add an item to the mayor's call. Both sides have real arguments; a judge decides.

The rule runs the other direction, and stated correctly it's stronger for the trustees. 65 ILCS 5/3.1-35-10 (and Manteno Code § 1-5-5) require the mayor to report her reasons at a meeting held 5–10 days AFTER the removal. If she "fails or refuses to report," the statute says the officer "thereupon shall be restored", automatically, no vote needed. From the June 12 letter, that window ran roughly June 17–22. Her only documented articulation was a June 25, 9:34 p.m. email re-sending the June 15 email ("You have had this information for over a week"), after the window, not at a meeting. In fairness, one open question cuts her way: if the removal was effective when communicated (June 15) rather than when the letter was dated, the window ran to June 25, the very day her signed call listed "articulation of reason" as an agenda item. No court has settled which date starts the clock.

Manteno's code says "the office of village attorney is hereby created" (§ 1-9-2), and the Municipal Code's own holdover rule says that when no successor is appointed, "the person filling the office shall continue in office until a successor has been chosen and has qualified" (65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5(d)). A holdover remains an officer in office. No Illinois case supports a "holdovers can be dropped without the removal statute's procedures" theory, and the removal letter itself invoked that statute and pledged the 5–10-day report, which concedes the framework. One genuinely open wrinkle: a Feb. 2025 ordinance lets a law firm "fill" the office, and no case resolves whether a firm can hold a municipal office at all.

The power is real; the conditions are the fight. In Westmont v. Lenihan, a new mayor removed a village attorney appointed by his predecessor and the court said he "was not obligated" to consult the board first. But the same statute makes restoration automatic if the 5–10-day report is missed, lets two-thirds "of all members authorized by law to be elected" of the corporate authorities restore the officer (for a village that is the president and six trustees, seven, so on the plain reading 5 votes; the trustees' three disapproval votes, 4–2 on June 15, 4–0 on June 25 and 4–1–1 on July 6, each had four, one short on that reading, and no published Illinois case decides the denominator), and forbids removing the same officer twice "for the same offense." A temporary replacement is authorized only after a valid dismissal, and that authority comes not from 3.1-35-10 but from 65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5(d) and Manteno Code § 1-5-5(E), which also cap a temporary officer at 30 days and bar the same person from being temporarily appointed more than twice in one fiscal year. The Attorney General has also warned that serial "temporary" appointments can't be used to circumvent the board's consent (Op. 94-012). Power: yes. Unconditional power: no. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version led with "4 of 6" and treated 5 of 7 as the outlier, and attributed the temporary-replacement rule to 3.1-35-10. The statute's text points to 5 of 7, and the temporary-appointment power is in 3.1-30-5(d) and § 1-5-5(E).

WFAV 95.1 reported that Mayor LaMore asked Police Chief Alan Swinford to remove Cainkar from the board table and "both refused to do so." The Vedette added that Swinford said he lacked legal authority, and quoted LaMore: "I'm going to deal with Swinford later." The board then voted 4-1-1 to retain Cainkar.

The resignation is confirmed and now dated: the Village's posted June 25 minutes record Trustee Boudreau announcing that Orth "had resigned on Tuesday," June 23, mid-fight and three weeks after he took the job, and a trustee texted that night, "So we will be going onto clerk number 4, this is unbelievable." Orth's formal letter, dated July 14, was produced under FOIA 26-168; he served through August 28. Trustee Barry's sworn affidavit in the lawsuit says the Village "had no sitting Clerk" on June 25. What is not documented anywhere: his stated reason. Since then the office has turned over again: Crystal Wolfe was appointed August 20 and resigned after about two weeks, and on September 21 the mayor named former clerk Allen Pickrel temporary clerk (Rolniak → Pickrel → Orth → Wolfe → Pickrel, temporary). Updated September 22, 2026 with the June 25 minutes and the July 14 letter.

After the June 25 and July 6 votes, Cainkar acts with the board majority's backing while the mayor seats counsel from Vasselli Law (most recently Brian Miller) and says a Vasselli Law attorney "will be the village attorney at the next meeting." The July 10 lawsuit exists precisely to break this deadlock: it asks a court to declare the June 25 meeting void and bar Cainkar from acting for the village.

Every reachable record contradicts this. In the Gotion case (2023 CH 37), the plaintiffs' counsel of record have only ever been Robby Dube and Bailey Stubbe (Eckland & Blando) with local counsel David Bergdahl; the Village's counsel of record is Cainkar; Gotion's is Polsinelli. Docket minutes and coverage of every hearing through July 8, 2026 show no Vasselli appearance for any party. The likely source of the screenshot: the new July 10 case, where a docket line genuinely reads Vasselli Law = attorney for plaintiff, the plaintiff being the Village of Manteno, suing four trustees. Same words, opposite meaning. (Note: the circulating version says "James A. Vasselli"; the Manteno attorney is James M.)

Contemporaneous reporting: in 2001, weeks after 9/11, Cook County prosecutor James Vasselli, then 27, "placed an envelope full of sugar on the desk of fellow prosecutor Adam Weber. The envelope bore the return address of a person Weber was prosecuting… Vasselli admitted what he had done and resigned." He acknowledged the incident publicly at the June 15, 2026 Manteno meeting ("over 20 years ago"). One caution on retellings: it produced no bar discipline; his ARDC record is clean (checked July 16, 2026).

Checked live on the ARDC's official Lawyer Search on July 16, 2026: James M. Vasselli, admitted October 3, 2000, is "Active and authorized to practice law," reports malpractice insurance, and shows "Public Record of Discipline and Pending Proceedings: None." (ARDC investigations, if any existed, are confidential, but nothing public exists.)

What the record shows: on April 19, 2026, eight weeks before the appointment, LaMore texted the village's forensic auditor: "I'll be talking with my lawyer tomorrow when he gets back from a vacation. He is suggesting having a meeting with you, myself, and Trustee Barry this week at his office in Oak Brook." Vasselli's office is in Oak Brook, and he became her appointee eight weeks later, but the text doesn't name him. When Crockett asked whether Vasselli had been paid for months of work, Vasselli denied compensation ("she bought me a coffee once… banana bread"), a denial of payment, not of the relationship. The Village fully withheld the FOIA item seeking records of pre-June-16 LaMore–Vasselli meetings, citing attorney-client privilege, which implies responsive records exist. Update, September 22, 2026: the Village has since produced a Vasselli Law engagement letter dated June 4, 2026, signed by the mayor alone at $220 an hour, and an invoice with entries from June 8 (a June 9 "Phone call with Mayor," a June 12 conference call, a June 14 board-meeting entry). That documents a working relationship eleven days before the board saw his name, not ten months; the April 19 text remains the earliest hint. (The June 15 minutes give Crockett's claim as "the past 10 months"; an earlier version of this card said "the past year.")

The deed FOX 32 aired (Kankakee County doc 202505649, John D. & Jacqueline Bohac to Constellation Energy Generation LLC, $1.5M, recorded June 23, 2025) carries the block "Prepared by: James M. Vasselli, Vasselli Law, LLC, 2021 Midwest Road, Ste. 200, Oak Brook." The county's free records index confirms that deed and 14 more Constellation acquisitions totaling $41.7M in listed prices (June 2025–March 2026, near the Braidwood plant). (FOX 32 reported "$47.5M across 14 deals" from records it obtained by FOIA; the free index lags about ten days and lists prices only where disclosed, so the two counts differ; we cite the index we can show.) Whether Vasselli prepared the other deeds is unknown until the document images are pulled. If he did, the mayor's chosen village attorney was simultaneously the buyer's lawyer for the region's biggest land assemblage, a disclosure question, not an accusation of wrongdoing.

Zimbelman asked about it; Vasselli answered that he "was trying to protect the attorney-client privilege to the best of his ability" regarding "the clerk's records", a response that acknowledges some underlying matter without identifying it. No Public Access Counselor binding opinion, court record, or news report naming Vasselli or his firm in a FOIA-withholding determination could be located. If the case exists, it's likely a non-indexed determination letter.

The firm's public team page lists eight attorneys; none shows Public Access Bureau history in their bios, and no determination letters signed by any of them could be located. The claim traces to a single unattributed line and remains unmatched to a named person.

Illinois campaign-finance databases return zero results for "Vasselli" (no contributions by him or his firm to anyone) and show no registered committee for Annette LaMore at all (small local candidates below filing thresholds often have none). By this page's own rubric that's "Unsupported," not "False": with no committee registered, contributions below the filing thresholds would be invisible to these databases, so absence of a record here can't affirmatively disprove the claim. On the available records there is nothing to find.

The auditors' written report neither finds fraud nor clears anyone, and it says it does not claim to be complete. The sentence that the auditors found "no serious improprieties or fraud" appears in Shaw Local's May 23, 2026 story about the May 20 presentation, and it is the reporter's sentence, not a quote from either auditor. Asked at that meeting whether anybody was getting arrested, the auditor answered, "That's not my call." What the 186-page report documents are process concerns: bidding transparency, bank-deposit concentration, a land sale's economics. Those concerns are real and specific (see below), but "the audit found fraud" is not something the auditors said, and Trustee Boudreau's own review ("my auditor friend, our town lawyer… haven't found any concrete evidence of fraud") reached the same place. The reverse claim, "the audit found nothing at all", is equally wrong. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version of this card said the auditors themselves "reported finding no serious improprieties or fraud." That was the newspaper's wording, not theirs; the error was ours.

The audit's "Nugent Family Payments" schedule totals $7,556,985: Tenco Excavating (owned by former Mayor Nugent's nephews) $7,345,130; Kevin Nugent Construction (brother) $181,855; NKIDS Group LLC $30,000. The context that must travel with the number: Tenco was repeatedly the low bidder (Trustee Gesky says its wins saved the village roughly $1 million versus rival bids), and the auditors alleged no fraud. The sharpest documented detail is procedural: on the Legacy Park job, a sole $725,895 bid was rejected on the engineer's advice, the engineer's estimate then dropped by $947,924 with no explanation (the audit's words: "We did not find any explanation from the Engineer"), and the rebid went to Tenco at $984,111.

Per the audit, ~98% of village cash ($30.5M of about $31.2M, including $25.3M in sewer-sale proceeds) sat at HomeStar Bank, where Treasurer Sheila Martin's husband Patrick was president; a week after HomeStar's 2019 acquisition, $12.5M moved to the National Bank of St. Anne, whose president Edward Meier is former Mayor Nugent's son-in-law, a relationship confirmed in print back in 2019 ("Meier also is the son-in-law of Manteno Mayor Tim Nugent"). The context: village attorney Cainkar reviewed the treasurer question in February 2026 and concluded he "cannot see how depositing money with a financial institution at which a family member is an officer violates" the cited laws. Concentration and family ties are documented; illegality is not.

The FOIA'd text messages show the famous line, "I do wonder what account the money went into", was sent by Mayor LaMore to the auditor, not by the auditor. And her text says the cell-tower material came from Google Gemini: "Accdg to AI (Gemini)… We found this on AI… My daughter looked this up," followed by her own caveat, "AI is not always accurate.....right?" The produced audit does not resolve any cell-tower question. What this actually documents is the mayor feeding AI-generated leads to a forensic auditor mid-engagement.

Two events get merged. The planned April 28 public draft presentation was cancelled after Trustee Crockett, who had spoken to the auditor directly, objected that "what currently exists is a draft audit only"; the draft was instead read privately at Village Hall by the mayor, administrator, treasurer, and Trustee Barry. The meeting where trustees stopped a presentation was May 18, and the "371 people were watching YouTube" figure comes from LaMore's own mid-May text ("Those trustees who stopped your presentation thought only of themselves…"), with no independent source for the number. The findings were ultimately presented publicly two days later, at a special meeting on May 20.

The attorney-dismissal request (26-133) was received Friday, June 19 and answered Friday, June 26, exactly five business days: on time (June 19 was Juneteenth, a state holiday; if the Village observed it, the statutory clock started even later and the response was early). The audit request (26-106) was received May 20; on May 27 the Village emailed to request a two-day extension to June 2, which the requester agreed to, and the records were produced June 3, a day after the agreed June 2 date: an agreed extension, missed by one day, not the kind of late response the Act penalizes. On timing, neither response was a meaningful FOIA violation. The more substantive FOIA issue isn't timing; it's the withholding of records under attorney-client privilege, examined in detail at c37.

Audit-documented: $352,334 paid to remove the state's reverter clause; sole bid of $600,000 from Alexander Real Properties for ~132 acres (~$1,388/acre net to the village per the audit's math; tax records show $570,000, including $30,000 in personal assets); the buyer later resold 49.38 acres at $13,082/acre and 11.24 acres at $12,000/acre, roughly 9–10× the village's per-acre realization. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version said "$570,000 plus $39,000"; the audit says "$570,000, including $30,000 in personal assets." The auditors concluded the village "did not realize the property's full value." Context: the sale was a public transaction with local-only advertising; the audit questioned the value obtained, not its legality.

Three separate things are being fused. The Essex buyer is Constellation Energy Generation, a nuclear utility assembling ~700 acres near its Braidwood plant, on the record about seeking annexation and saying it has no data-center customer yet. There is no documented Gotion connection to any Essex parcel. And the records surfaced through an ordinary FOIA request to the county recorder, the opposite of a sealed deal; this site pulled the same index for free. No document shows Kankakee County Board involvement in the purchases. What IS fair to say: two sitting Essex village trustees sold land to Constellation ($1.5M and ~$22.4M respectively), which raises disclosure-and-recusal questions in Essex, and the deed work connects to Manteno only through the attorney who prepared at least one deed (see the Vasselli claim above).

County records confirm trustee John Bohac (with Jacqueline Bohac) sold for $1,500,000 (June 2025), and trustee Ed Foley's trust and company sold in exactly four transactions totaling ≈$22.36M, including $17M in one deed and a further $2M sale in March 2026, after the coverage window. Selling land is legal; the open governance question is recusal: whether either trustee votes on Constellation's annexation and zoning while being its counterparty.

County records show ABCO Electrical Construction & Design LLC recorded six mechanic's liens on January 16, 2026 against the Gotion plant site (naming Gotion Inc., 333 South Spruce LLC, the general contractor, and a 2024 mortgage trust). The four smallest were released between March and July 14, 2026. The two largest, $501,121.50 and $61,872.55, show no release in the index as of July 16. Caution: the free index lags about ten days, and a lien can be disputed or settled without meaning anyone "refused to pay." Confirmed liens, unconfirmed conclusion.

The released June 22 group chat, on the mayor's phone with attorney Vasselli, includes a participant whose contact card renders as "Dennis Rebelletti" ("I think that will work. Im flying in from DC that afternoon") and a "Julie" whom Vasselli says is "caught up to speed." The thread's header reads "4 People," meaning five including the mayor; Trustee Barry was a member, which is how he had the same thread. Both names are now identified by the Village's own records: Vasselli Law invoice #2024072819, produced August 3 in response to FOIA 26-173, lists Dennis Reboletti (6.0 hours on June 14, "Manteno Board Meeting; Travel") and Julie Diemer, Of Counsel, with 17.2 of the invoice's 23.5 hours, including a June 9 "Phone call with Mayor." Reboletti is a former state legislator; on the invoice he and Diemer appear as members of the Vasselli Law team billing the Village. What remains open is narrower: who authorized that work, since the engagement letter is dated June 4 and signed by the mayor alone, eleven days before the board saw Vasselli's name. (Attribution note: an earlier private summary put the "flying in from DC" line in Vasselli's mouth; the screenshots show it was Reboletti.) Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version of this card said the Reboletti match was "name-only and should not be asserted" and floated a private CCOM board member with the first name Julie as a possible match. Both were wrong. The invoice identifies Dennis Reboletti and Julie Diemer of Vasselli Law; we have removed the lead and regret naming a private individual on a first-name match.

The letter is unsigned (typed "Respectfully, Annette LaMore"), cites specific statutes and doctrine, and circulated as a file named "…Removal Letter REV06122026.docx", proving at least one earlier draft existed. But no metadata, cover email, or drafting record appears in any production, and the village answered the FOIA item for legal research behind it with "no responsive documents." Author unknown; the inference is plausible and unproven.

Illinois mayors can veto ordinances and certain resolutions; whether a board's disapproval-of-removal or retention action is veto-able at all is a live legal question, and if Cainkar was restored automatically by the mayor's missed 5–10-day report, a veto of a later vote wouldn't change that. Update, July 20, 2026 (corrected September 22): at the next regular meeting the mayor announced from the chair, at 53:42, "under old business tonight, I'm vetoing the Cainkar appointment that was made at the last meeting." No written objection was returned, and the Village later certified in writing that no veto message exists (FOIA 26-168). An earlier version of this card said no veto was exercised; that rested on a caption capture that cut off before the announcement, and the error was ours. In the same report she said she had also sought a temporary restraining order and that "a judge [would] determine the appropriate legal representation for the village" at a hearing set for the next morning, Tuesday, July 21, at 9:00 a.m. at the Kankakee County Courthouse. So the veto rested on an oral announcement with nothing in writing, and the question of who represents the Village moved to court on an expedited track (ahead of the July 30 case-management conference). Resolved, July 21, 2026 (dismissed for lack of a filed complaint). The hearing was held Tuesday morning, and Kankakee County Circuit Judge Lindsay Parkhurst dismissed the Village's entire lawsuit (Case 26CH21) for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction, because the Village had moved for an emergency restraining order without ever filing an underlying complaint. In the court's words, "the court lacks subject matter jurisdiction because no complaint was filed to vest the court with jurisdiction over the matter and no exception applies." Two points matter here. First, the judge did not decide who represents the Village. The mayor had told the July 20 board meeting she expected "a judge [to] determine the appropriate legal representation," but the case was thrown out on a threshold defect before any such ruling, so the Cainkar-versus-Vasselli question is still legally unresolved. Second, the dismissal reached no merits: not the veto question, not the June 25 meeting, nothing. On what comes next: a jurisdictional dismissal for a never-filed complaint does not decide the merits, and on July 20 Vasselli Law had already moved for leave to file a plaintiff's complaint "within 72 hours," so the Village could try again by actually filing the lawsuit. Update, September 22, 2026: it did. The matter returned before Judge Parkhurst on August 17 and September 21; the trustees filed their response on September 21, and arguments are set for 10 a.m. on Thursday, November 12, 2026 (see the lawsuit page). Until a ruling, Cainkar's board-approved retention stands. Correction to our earlier note. While this was developing we described the dismissal as being "on the pleadings", on how the complaint was written, and drew an echo to the 2024 dismissal of the CCOM complaint. That was not accurate: here there was no complaint on file at all, so the defect was jurisdictional, not a poorly-drafted pleading. We've corrected the characterization and logged it (see the change log).

Shaw Local's "House Divided" article (April 5, 2025), published when LaMore was mayor-elect, says she "was the driving force behind the suit for the Concerned Citizens, but she said she's stepping away from that role." CCOM formed in September 2023, within weeks of the Pritzker-Gotion announcement, founded by Amanda Piker after residents, in Piker's words, "found out about it a week before the announcement was officially made." LaMore and Piker appeared together on Fox Business's "The Bottom Line" (December 8, 2023) to discuss the community effort to stop the plant, and LaMore is identified with CCOM in that coverage. She won the April 1, 2025 mayoral race with 55.5% (1,536–1,231) over trustee Joel Gesky, running explicitly against the plant. (A quote sometimes attributed to her in the Daily Journal, "I don't see chemicals and Chinese Communists as a good thing for our town," could not be located in the paper's March 11, April 2 or April 5, 2025 articles; we are not asserting it until a source is found.) In the same April 5 article, as mayor-elect, she said of the suit: "the village is part of the lawsuit, I have to walk away from that." She did not use the word "leadership"; "driving force" was the reporter's characterisation, and her remark was made before she took office, not after. Context, and an important precision: LaMore did not found CCOM (Piker did), and state corporate filings show LaMore has never held a formal office or directorship in CCOM at any point. The 2023 articles of incorporation list Amanda Piker and four other directors; the September 13, 2025 annual report lists three (Piker, Ludwig and Forsythe). LaMore's name appears on neither. Her role was as an activist and public face of the effort, not a corporate officer. Opposing a development project as a private citizen is not, by itself, a legal violation. And the mayor now flatly disputes the "leader" label. At the July 20, 2026 board meeting she stated: "I am not and I did not found the CCOM. I have never had a leadership position with CCOM, but I was and I am a concerned citizen of Manteno who ran and was elected for mayor in response to such concerns." So the record cuts two ways: a news outlet (Shaw Local) characterized her as "the driving force behind the suit," and she appeared publicly for the cause (the Fox Business segment), but she held no formal CCOM office, and she has now denied any leadership role on the record. What is not in dispute is that she was publicly aligned with the anti-Gotion effort before taking office and that the organization is still suing the Village; whether "leader" is the right word is genuinely contested, which is why this is graded Disputed rather than True. Corrected September 22, 2026: earlier versions of this card quoted Shaw Local as saying LaMore "led the Concerned Citizens of Manteno lawsuit"; the article does not contain that sentence. They also said the 2025 annual report listed five directors (it lists three), treated her April 2025 remark as a post-election admission of "leadership", and asserted the "Chinese Communists" quote without a located source. Those errors were ours.

Concerned Citizens of Manteno NFP (CCOM) and co-plaintiff Brian Kovaka filed suit in December 2023 challenging the rezoning of the former Kmart distribution center from light (I-1) to heavy (I-2) industrial that allowed the Gotion lithium battery plant to operate. The procedural road has been long: the original complaint, which also named then-Mayor Nugent and the plan commission chair personally, was dismissed September 30, 2024 by Judge Lindsay Parkhurst, who called it "unanswerable" ("reads like [a] novel or thesis"), with the claims against the individual officials dismissed with prejudice and leave to replead the rest. The amended version fared far better: in May 2025 the court allowed 7 of 10 claims to proceed (nuisance claims over dangerous chemicals (lithium, NMP), environmental/safety claims, and the rezoning challenge itself) against the Village, 333 South Spruce LLC, Gotion Inc., and (added February 2026) Gotion Illinois New Energy Inc., the entity actually operating the plant. Plaintiffs' counsel Robby Dube: "Everything that Gotion tried to do, they lost on." The case is in active discovery (18,000+ pages produced), new plaintiffs were approved in May 2026 subject to a surveyed 1,200-foot proximity dispute, and an August 17, 2026 hearing is set on the fourth amended complaint. The Village's defense attorney in that case was Joe Cainkar. Trustee C.J. Boudreau explicitly cited this active litigation as a reason to keep Cainkar when LaMore moved to replace him, opposing a switch of law firms "during active litigation against residents." CCOM founder Amanda Piker has publicly stated that Cainkar was "keeping" the lawsuit alive "even though he keeps running around saying the Village can't win", and that the lawsuit would "go away" if the Village "admits guilt to CCOM" (see c36). The Village filed the current lawsuit against four trustees using the Vasselli firm, not Cainkar.

The factual predicate is established in published reporting: (1) LaMore was a prominent public figure in the anti-Gotion effort before becoming mayor; Shaw Local called her "the driving force behind the suit" when she was mayor-elect, though she now disputes any leadership role and held no formal CCOM office (see c29); (2) CCOM is actively suing the Village; (3) Cainkar was the Village's defense attorney in that case; (4) LaMore fired Cainkar. Facts (2)–(4) are undisputed; the degree of her CCOM involvement is contested but real. The conflict-of-interest inference is significant: a mayor who was personally a plaintiff-side leader in a lawsuit against the municipality she now leads made the decision to remove the attorney defending the municipality against that lawsuit, at a time when the CCOM suit was in active discovery. Whether this constitutes an actionable conflict of interest under Illinois law has not been adjudicated and is not established. Illinois's statutory conflict provisions, 50 ILCS 105/3 and 65 ILCS 5/3.1-55-10, reach only financial interests in municipal contracts; a non-financial affiliation with a plaintiff group is a question of common-law fiduciary duty, not of those statutes. LaMore said on April 5, 2025, as mayor-elect, that because "the village is part of the lawsuit, I have to walk away from that"; state corporate filings confirm she held no formal CCOM office or board seat at any point, so her involvement was as an activist rather than an officer, a distinction that cuts against the strongest, formal version of a conflict claim even as the underlying alignment remains documented. She has not publicly addressed the conflict-of-interest question. It has not been raised in the current Village-v.-trustees lawsuit. This is a question the current litigation does not resolve; watch for it in future proceedings or a separate challenge. Corrected September 22, 2026: earlier versions of this card quoted Shaw Local as saying LaMore "led" the lawsuit, cited 5 ILCS 120/2 (the Open Meetings Act's closed-session section) as a conflict-of-interest provision, and described her April 2025 remark as a post-election admission of leadership. All three were our errors.

65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-50(e) does say: if a second appointment fails to receive the board's advice and consent, the mayor "may make a temporary appointment from those persons who were appointed but whose appointments failed." LaMore has said the board rejected a counsel change twice (2–4 against attorney Tiffany Thompson on June 16, 2025, and 4–2 against Vasselli on June 15, 2026, per the Village's minutes). The first problem with the argument: 65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-50 is titled "Events upon which an elective office becomes vacant," and subsection (e) governs filling a trustee vacancy. It has no application to the appointed office of village attorney. The only temporary-appointment power for an appointed officer is 65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5(d) together with Manteno Code § 1-5-5(E), which apply after death, disability, a disqualifying conviction, or "dismissal from or abandonment of office," cap a temporary officer at 30 days, and bar any person from being temporarily appointed "more than two times in any one fiscal year." The mayor's own sworn affidavit in the lawsuit says she acted under § 1-5-5(E). The second problem: that authority only arises when there is a lawful vacancy, and the only way to create a vacancy here is through a valid removal of the incumbent officer (Cainkar). The removal statute (65 ILCS 5/3.1-35-10) required LaMore to report her reasons to the board at a meeting held 5–10 days after June 12; she did not do so, and the statutory consequence is that Cainkar "thereupon shall be restored." If the restoration clause triggered, there is no vacancy, and no temporary appointment can fill it regardless of how many confirmation votes failed. Attorney General Op. 94-012 (1994) approved exactly the kind of limit § 1-5-5(E) codifies, and warns against using serial temporary appointments to circumvent the board's confirmation role. The Village's July 10, 2026 court filing does not cite 3.1-10-50(e). Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version of this card said the June 2025 rejection was of Vasselli (it was of Tiffany Thompson) and said 3.1-10-50(e) satisfies the "second rejection" trigger "on its face." It does not apply to an appointed office at all. Both errors were ours; the grade has moved from Disputed to False as to the statute cited.

As of July 17, 2026, the "About" page of nogotion-illinois.com, which describes itself as "Concerned Citizens of Manteno/No Gotion Illinois (not for profit)", i.e., the plaintiff organization, carries a full roster of the village board with party labels. It tags Mayor Annette LaMore, Village Clerk Kerri Rolniak, and Trustees Michael Barry and Peggy Vaughn "Freedom Party – No Gotion," and Trustees Boudreau, Crockett, Gesky and Zimbelman "Choice Party – Pro Gotion." It is a roster with labels, not a list of supporters; the four trustees who oppose the mayor are on the same page. The Freedom Party names are the entire bloc elected in April 2025, labeled as the movement's own on the website of the organization actively suing the Village they now help govern. The same site says the group has raised over $70,000 in donations for the legal fight and is represented by Eckland & Blando, the firm that also represented plant opponents in Michigan and, per the site, a group that stopped a project in North Dakota. Context: being labeled a supporter of a citizens group is not illegal, and elected officials retain First Amendment rights. But it is directly relevant to the questions in c31: two of the officials listed (LaMore, Barry) hold votes or vetoes over Village decisions in litigation where the listed organization is the adverse party. (Websites change; this grade describes the page as viewed July 17, 2026, and will be re-checked if it changes.) Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version described the page as a list of supporting officials and omitted that the four opposing trustees appear on the same roster with their own label. Regraded from Verified to True, with context.

Documented: at the January 2026 board meeting where Mayor LaMore's allies pushed to ask Gotion to voluntarily file with CFIUS (the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.), village attorney Cainkar told the board, "I don't see the purpose in it from a pure legal standpoint." The request failed 3–2: Barry and Vaughn (the mayor's bloc) for; Boudreau, Crockett, and Gesky against. LaMore said afterward, "It would certainly show good faith if they said, 'Yeah, we'll be glad to fill that out.'" Five months later she removed Cainkar, saying he "was not serving us justice" and suggesting he remained loyal to "the old regime." Context and caution: the sequence is documented; the motive connection is an inference. Cainkar's stated CFIUS position (echoed by Gotion's own counsel, and consistent with CFIUS's reported conclusion in Michigan that it lacked jurisdiction over the land deal) was a legal-judgment call, not advocacy for Gotion. LaMore's stated reasons for the removal were about responsiveness and loyalty, not Gotion. Whether the Gotion divide contributed to the firing is exactly the kind of question the conflict-of-interest analysis in c31 turns on. Update, July 20, 2026: the mayor herself put a Gotion motive partly on the record. In her President's Report she listed among her reasons for replacing Cainkar that, "under the legal advice of the former village attorney, the village approved a heavy industrial company in Manteno that I believe was misaligned with our own ordinances, that poor decision has resulted in a lawsuit," and that she could find no village contracts he had written to hold Gotion to its safety obligations ("I have yet to find any such village contracts… I found that astounding"). So the causation is no longer purely inferred; the mayor has publicly tied the firing, in part, to Cainkar's Gotion-related advice. (These are her characterizations; Cainkar has not responded on the record, and a lawyer's advice to approve a permitted use is not by itself misconduct.)

The parallel is real and specific. In Green Charter Township, Michigan, where Gotion proposed a $2.4B plant, opponents recalled the entire township board in November 2023; the new anti-Gotion board rescinded the township's support and withdrew a water-line approval. The same law firm now representing CCOM, Eckland & Blando, represented Michigan plant opponents. The national overlay is also shared: the LaHood–Moolenaar "NO GOTION Act" (introduced Nov. 2023, reintroduced 2025 with Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Jared Golden) targets both the Michigan and Manteno plants' access to federal green-energy tax credits, citing Gotion High-Tech bylaws that commit the parent company "to carry out Party activities in accordance with the Constitution of the [Chinese Communist Party]." Manteno's version of the playbook ran through the ballot box instead of recall: the Freedom Party swept the mayor's office in April 2025. Now the warning label. Michigan shows how expensive the next chapter can be: Gotion sued Green Charter Township in federal court, won a preliminary injunction in May 2024 ordering the township to honor its development agreement, and by June 2026 was seeking $24 million in damages over the canceled plant. The township, whose normal legal budget was about $10,000 a year, has burned roughly $500,000 in legal fees and carries a $400,000 budget shortfall. Manteno's situation differs in one decisive way: the Manteno plant is already built and operating (~300 employees as of late 2025), which makes any "just undo it" path harder, riskier, and more expensive than Michigan's, where the plant only ever existed on paper.

Three legal problems with the "admit guilt and it's over" framing. First, who decides: under Village of Westmont v. Lenihan's reading of the Municipal Code, decisions about the Village's legal affairs belong to the mayor and board acting together; no single official (and not the mayor alone) can concede or settle the case unilaterally, and the current board majority has shown no appetite to capitulate. Second, the Village isn't the only defendant: Gotion Inc., Gotion Illinois New Energy Inc., and the property owner 333 South Spruce LLC are all separately represented parties actively contesting the claims. If the Village stopped defending tomorrow, the case against the other defendants, and the fight over the rezoning's validity, would continue; a "confession" by one defendant does not dissolve a multi-defendant lawsuit. Third, the price tag: the relief CCOM seeks would unwind the zoning under a $2 billion plant that is already built, staffed, and operating. Michigan previews what happens when a municipality turns on Gotion mid-stream: a federal injunction enforcing the development agreement and, as of June 2026, a $24 million damages claim against a township that "admitted" nothing; it merely rescinded support. A Manteno reversal would invite the same exposure, at bigger scale, from a counterparty already on site. None of this means the CCOM suit is meritless (a judge kept 7 of 10 claims alive), but "admit guilt and it goes away" compresses a multi-party, multi-million-dollar problem into a sentence. It isn't that simple.

First, the fair part: the Village has released a great deal: the full forensic audit, roughly 150 pages of attorney-dispute communications, the group texts. This is not wholesale stonewalling. But on the core request about the attorney's removal (FOIA 26-133), the Village withheld an unspecified set of records under attorney-client privilege, and the manner is part of the story. In a July 2, 2026 email, the Village's FOIA officer wrote that she had forwarded the request to Mayor LaMore and that "Mayor LaMore informed me that anything else she has is attorney client privileged." On its face, that means the official whose own communications were sought, and whose administration then sued four trustees, personally made the privilege determination over her own records. No index of the withheld documents was provided. Illinois FOIA requires a written denial giving the reasons, "a detailed factual basis for the application of any exemption claimed," the specific exemption with supporting legal authority, and the names of those responsible (5 ILCS 140/9(a)-(b)); it does not itself require a document-by-document index, though a court may order one. Two things make the privilege claim contestable: (1) the exemption protects communications with an attorney who represents the public body, and the board rejected Vasselli 4–2 and reinstated Cainkar. The Village has since produced a Vasselli Law engagement letter dated June 4, 2026, signed by the mayor alone at $220 an hour, and an invoice with entries from June 8, so Vasselli did have a relationship before June 15, with the mayor. The question is whether a mayor's unilateral engagement, never consented to by the board, creates a privilege for the Village; and (2) Trustee Barry produced some of the very records the Village withheld (the LaMore–Vasselli scheduling texts), showing they exist and weren't treated as privileged by another custodian. Fairness caveats: a public body is entitled to assert privilege; the FOIA officer may simply have been describing her process; and whether the withholding was proper is contested and unadjudicated. The requester's remedy is a Request for Review by the Illinois Attorney General's Public Access Counselor. Nothing here is a finding that any law was broken. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version said Vasselli had "no Village relationship" before June 15 and that section 9(a) requires each withheld record to be identified. The June 4 engagement letter shows the first was wrong, and the second overstated the statute.

333 South Spruce LLC, the Delaware entity that bought the former Kmart warehouse for $137.4 million and owns the land under the Gotion plant, and a named defendant in the CCOM lawsuit, shows a status of "REVOKED" as of May 8, 2026 in the Illinois Secretary of State's records. The cause is administrative: the company registered in Illinois in November 2023 (two days before closing) and, per the state record, never filed a single annual report. Context and caution: revocation for a missed annual report is a routine compliance lapse, not a finding of fraud or wrongdoing, and companies commonly cure it by paying a fee and reinstating. But it carries a real consequence: under 805 ILCS 180/45-45 an unadmitted foreign LLC may still defend a lawsuit but cannot maintain an action in Illinois courts, and revocation under 45-35 ends the company's admission. By contrast, the plant's operating company, Gotion Illinois New Energy Inc., is active and current. The plainest way to put it: the entity holding the land under a $2 billion plant, and a defendant in active litigation, let its authority to do business in Illinois lapse over a routine filing, and had not cured it as of mid-July.

Federal records show OSHA opened a complaint-based inspection of Gotion Illinois New Energy Inc. at 333 S. Spruce St. on January 21, 2026. On March 30, 2026 it issued two citations: a "serious" violation of the powered-industrial-truck (forklift) standard, 29 CFR 1910.178(n)(6), with a $13,240 proposed penalty, and an "other-than-serious" injury-recordkeeping violation, 1904.29(b)(3), at $1,891; $15,131 total. Context: both citations were contested by the employer on June 26, 2026 and the case remains open, so the violations are alleged, not final; contesting is a normal step and penalties can be reduced or vacated. Manufacturing plants draw routine OSHA activity. What's notable is simply that a worker complaint drew federal inspectors, who found a serious safety issue; it sits alongside the unreleased mechanic's-lien picture (see c25) as documented friction at the plant.