Three genuinely contested questions decide the Manteno attorney fight. For each one, here is the mayor's position, the trustees' position, and the governing statute or case, checked against the Illinois Compiled Statutes and Illinois case law rather than either side's brief.
Three genuinely contested questions decide this case. For each, here is the mayor's position, the trustees' position, and the governing statute or case, checked against the Illinois Compiled Statutes and Illinois case law, not just the parties' briefs. This is analysis of public law, not legal advice.
The Village argues the meeting wasn't convened the way Village Code § 1-6-3 requires: a written, signed call presented to the Clerk, then Clerk-served notice. It says no proper call went through the Clerk and the agenda was posted by a staffer at a trustee's direction; Trustee Barry objected on the record and left. On that view, the meeting is void, and the mayor's affidavit states she "did not call or authorize" it.
The meeting was real and noticed; indeed, the mayor herself signed a written call for a June 25 special meeting. Board members may add an item (the reinstatement motion) to a called special meeting, which is exactly what a trustee formally requested in writing. The 48-hour Open Meetings Act notice was met, and disapproving the removal was legitimate board business.
The Village's own FOIA records complicate the "no meeting was ever called" framing: Mayor LaMore signed a written "Call for Special Meeting" for June 25 (signature hand-dated June 23) to take up the audit, Gotion, and her reasons for removing Cainkar, and a trustee then asked, in writing, to add the reinstatement vote to it. So the live questions narrow to whether § 1-6-3's Clerk-notice steps were actually followed, and whether bolting the reinstatement item onto the mayor's call was proper. On the statutes: Village Code § 1-6-3 governs how a special meeting is called; the Open Meetings Act, 5 ILCS 120/2.02, separately requires 48 hours' notice plus an agenda, and 5 ILCS 120/2.04 says those requirements are "in addition to … any other notice required by law", so OMA compliance alone would not cure a Village-Code defect. Whether § 1-6-3's steps are mandatory (a violation voids the action) or merely directory is a mixed question of fact and law for the judge. This one is genuinely close.
The board: going forward, the trustees who call a special meeting can take the § 1-6-3 question off the table themselves: a signed written call, served on the president and every trustee in person or by registered letter, with the notice and agenda posted 48 hours ahead as the Open Meetings Act requires (5 ILCS 120/2.02), and the proof of service kept. Nothing in the Open Meetings Act mentions a clerk; the notice duty runs to the public body.
The mayor: nominate a clerk. The vacancy is filled by the president's nomination with the board's consent (65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-50(f)(3); § 1-8-3), in one roll call, and the code's own notice route works again.
The Toolbox: special meetings without a clerk → · The clerk vacancy →
The president appoints officers with the board's advice and consent; trustees cannot install an attorney on their own. The filing cites the Illinois Municipal Code and Pechous v. Slawko (Ill. 1976) for the principle that a legislative body can't seize the executive's appointment power.
They didn't "appoint" anyone; they disapproved a removal. Under the removal statute, they argue, the mayor's failure to properly report the firing let them restore Cainkar. In their view they were exercising a check the statute gives them, not usurping an executive power.
The correct appointment statute is 65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5 ("Appointed officers in all municipalities"): the president "by and with the advice and consent of the … board of trustees, may appoint … an attorney." On this point, case law favors the mayor's structural argument: in Village of Westmont v. Lenihan (1998), a near-identical fight in which a new mayor removed a village attorney appointed by his predecessor, the appellate court held the mayor "was not obligated" to consult the board before the removal, and that trustees cannot unilaterally retain their own village counsel, because appointment power runs through the president with advice and consent. That said, "advice and consent" cuts both ways: the same rule means the mayor cannot force a permanent appointee on an unwilling board either, and the Attorney General has warned (Op. 94-012, 1994) that unlimited or successive "temporary" appointments of the same person cannot be used to "effectively circumvent" the board's right to approve or disapprove an appointment, a warning with particular force in Manteno, where the board has now rejected the mayor's proposed counsel change twice (2–4 against attorney Tiffany Thompson on June 16, 2025, per the Village's minutes, and 4–2 against Vasselli on June 15, 2026; "you have turned me down twice," as she put it). One codified escape valve exists for the trustees: Manteno Code § 1-9-4 (2001) lets the board, by simple majority, retain its own legislative counsel for board business, a narrower role than village attorney. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version said the June 2025 rejection was of Vasselli; it was of Tiffany Thompson.
The board: consent to a nominee. It cannot hire a village attorney on its own (Pechous; Westmont), but it can refuse to pay invoices for counsel it never approved, which it is doing, and it can retain its own legislative counsel by a majority of the trustees under § 1-9-4 for ordinance drafting, opinions on the board's powers and analysis of the validity of Village actions, a power Westmont's board did not have.
The mayor: the office is hers to fill, and she ends the standoff at any meeting by nominating someone four trustees will confirm, or by re-nominating Cainkar. A confirmed successor who qualifies displaces any holdover (65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5(d)).
Westmont favors the mayor on both points it decides: a new mayor may remove the village attorney without first consulting the board, and trustees cannot unilaterally retain village counsel, because engaging a village attorney takes the mayor and board acting together. The Westmont ordinance was a mayor-appoints-with-board-consent provision, structurally the same as Manteno Code § 1-9-2, so the case cannot be waved off as resting on a mayor-only ordinance; the one real Manteno difference is § 1-9-4, the board's own power to retain legislative counsel, which the Westmont board did not have. So if the June 25 meeting fails on § 1-6-3 grounds, the trustees' fallback cannot be "we hired him ourselves", and Cainkar's June 30 engagement letter ($250/hour, unsigned, sent to the administrator rather than approved by mayor-and-board together) is exactly the kind of unilateral retention the Village's lawsuit attacks. The trustees' cleanest path runs through the removal statute's automatic-restoration clause, not through hiring; their meeting-call compliance and that engagement letter are the two places their case can genuinely lose. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version called Westmont "the trustees' own best case on removal procedure." It is the mayor's case on both points.
To establish the mayor's appointment power, the Village's motion repeatedly cites 65 ILCS 5/3.1-35-25. That section is actually titled "Mayor or president; calling out militia"; it concerns mobilizing a militia to suppress riots, not appointing officers. The correct statute is 65 ILCS 5/3.1-30-5 (above). The mayor's own removal letter (dated June 12) did cite the right neighboring section for a firing (§ 3.1-35-10), which makes the appointment mis-cite to § 3.1-35-25 look like a drafting slip to an adjacent provision. It is an error opponents can be expected to highlight; it does not, however, sink the underlying principle, which the correct statute and Westmont support.
Two answers. First, the removal letter argues Cainkar was never formally reappointed by her administration, a mere "holdover", so the appointed-officer removal rules may not even apply. Second, the letter expressly invoked § 3.1-35-10 and pledged to report her reasons within the 5–10 day window; she treats her 30-day temporary appointment of Vasselli as the lawful status quo that the June 25 vote unlawfully tried to disturb.
State law requires a president who removes an appointed officer to report the reasons to the board at a meeting held 5–10 days later. Trustee Gesky publicly argued the mayor did not do this, so, they contend, Cainkar was restored by operation of law, independent of the June 25 meeting.
LaMore's additional statutory theory, and why it does not fit: the mayor has invoked a "second rejection" rule ("you have turned me down twice"), and her sworn affidavit in the lawsuit says she acted under Manteno Code § 1-5-5(E). Neither works the way it was presented. 65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-50 is titled "Events upon which an elective office becomes vacant"; its subsection (e), which lets a mayor make a temporary appointment "from those persons who were appointed but whose appointments failed" after two failed confirmations, governs filling a trustee vacancy and 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." That cap is the codified version of Attorney General Op. 94-012 (1994), which approved exactly this kind of limit on serial temporary appointments. Two consequences follow. First, a temporary appointment under § 1-5-5(E) presupposes a valid dismissal: if the restoration clause of § 3.1-35-10 kicked in (no timely report), Cainkar was never displaced, there was no vacancy, and the 30-day appointment had nothing to fill. Second, the two-per-fiscal-year cap on the same person bears directly on any repeated 30-day appointments of Vasselli. Section 1-5-5(E) is also the section read from the table on September 21 to justify a temporary village clerk, which the September 21 page takes apart for a different reason: the clerk is an elected office. See Fact Check c32. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version of this paragraph said the board rejected Vasselli in June 2025 (that rejection was of attorney Tiffany Thompson) and said 3.1-10-50(e) "on its face applies after two rejections." It does not apply to an appointed office at all. Both errors were ours.
65 ILCS 5/3.1-35-10 ("Mayor or president; removal of appointed officer") is the pivotal statute, and the Village's motion never cites it. It provides that after removing an appointed officer the president "shall report the reasons for the removal to the corporate authorities at a meeting to be held not less than 5 nor more than 10 days after the removal." If the president "fails or refuses to report," or the board disapproves by a two-thirds vote, "the officer thereupon shall be restored to the office." (On the vote branch, the statute's text points against the trustees. It requires two-thirds "of all members authorized by law to be elected" of the corporate authorities, and for a village the corporate authorities are the president and six trustees, seven people, so on the plain reading two-thirds is 5 votes. The trustees' four-vote disapprovals on June 15 (4–2, per the Village's posted minutes), June 25 (4–0) and July 6 (4–1–1) are each one short on that reading. Where the legislature meant to leave the mayor out it said so: 3.1-40-50 counts "alderpersons then holding office." Manteno Code § 1-5-5(F) uses "board of trustees by two-thirds vote," but an ordinance cannot lower a statutory threshold, and "board of trustees" is itself defined by 3.1-45-5 to include the president. No published Illinois case decides the denominator; a court could read it the trustees' way, but that is the harder reading. Corrected September 22, 2026: an earlier version led with 4 of 6 and treated 5 of 7 as the outlier, and omitted the June 15 vote.) The trustees do not need to win the denominator question if the missed report is established, because on that branch the restoration is automatic, and the president can end the whole question with one nomination the board will confirm (see the Toolbox). The removal letter is dated June 12 and was emailed June 15, so by its own terms the report was due "no less than five and no more than ten days" later, a tight window of roughly June 17–22. The strongest counter-argument available to the mayor deserves stating: if a court held the removal effective only when it was communicated (June 15) rather than when the letter was dated, the window would run to June 25, the very day her own signed call listed "articulation of reason for removal" as an agenda item. Which date anchors the clock has no square judicial answer. Even on that friendlier reading, though, she did not attend the June 25 meeting, and at 9:34 p.m. that night she emailed trustees that she was "resending you the email you already received on June 15," i.e., the removal letter itself, adding "You have had this information for over a week" (FOIA 26-138). Whether that satisfies a duty to report "at a meeting" held 5–10 days after removal is precisely what the trustees dispute; if a court finds she did not report in time, this statute could restore Cainkar regardless of whether the June 25 meeting was valid. It is the trustees' strongest argument, and its omission from the filing is notable. The mayor's rebuttal, that a long-serving holdover attorney may not be a protected "appointed officer" at all, faces two textual problems. First, Manteno's own code says "The office of village attorney is hereby created" (§ 1-9-2), and the Municipal Code lists "an attorney" among appointed officers, requires the constitutional oath of "all municipal officers, whether elected or appointed" (65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-25), and calls the appointed attorney's position an "appointive municipal office" (65 ILCS 5/3.1-10-6). Second, the statute's own holdover rule says that on a failure to appoint a successor, "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 in office, which is also why the clean way to displace one is to confirm a successor, not to skip the removal statute's procedures. A separate, genuinely unsettled wrinkle: § 1-9-2 was amended on Feb. 3, 2025 (Ord. 24-18, weeks before Mayor LaMore took office) to say the office "may be filled with an individual lawyer or a law firm", yet Illinois officers must personally swear the constitutional oath, which a law firm cannot do. No Illinois case squarely resolves whether a firm can hold a municipal office.
The board: rest on the missed report rather than the four-vote disapprovals. The restoration clause of 65 ILCS 5/3.1-35-10 is automatic when no report is made at a meeting 5 to 10 days after the removal, the Village has admitted in writing that none was (FOIA 26-173), and that branch does not depend on counting the president.
The mayor: the temporary route runs out on its own: serial 30-day appointments of the same person are capped at two per fiscal year by her own code (§ 1-5-5(E)), the practice the Attorney General warned against in Opinion 94-012. One nomination the board will confirm, or a re-nomination of Cainkar, ends the question at any meeting; nothing in 3.1-35-10 or 3.1-30-5 bars re-nominating a removed officer.
Each side has a real argument. The mayor is on firm ground that trustees cannot unilaterally appoint counsel (Westmont; § 3.1-30-5). The trustees are on firm ground that the removal statute (§ 3.1-35-10) imposes a strict reporting duty with an automatic-restoration penalty the lawsuit sidesteps. And the § 1-6-3 meeting question is genuinely close. A judge, not a website, will resolve it. The Village's July 10 suit was dismissed on July 21 for having no complaint on file; 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 November 12, 2026 (see the lawsuit page). As new rulings come in, this page will note them. For one observer's ranked guesses about what happens next (clearly labeled as opinion, not fact) see Looking Ahead on the lawsuit page.
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