Orland Park Mayor’s excessive spending on outside legal fees

Orland Mayor Keith Pekau spent nearly $300,000 on legal fees to fight the release of public information in battles with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. Pekau is the antithesis of transparency

By Ray Hanania

FREE/Orland Park, Legal Fees, Keith Pekau, FOIA denials/Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025

Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau doesn’t believe he needs to be accountable to taxpayers who pay his salary, which is why he attacks anyone (including me) who demands explanations of how he spends taxes.

He bullies people. Calls critics and political rivals names. He does it through his eNewsletter and from his taxpayer-paid Village Board podium.

Worse, he uses taxpayer money to prevent the dissemination of public information on his excessive spending, such as, how much he spends on legal fees.

In response to a lengthy FOIA battle, led by a local activist, the Village was forced to acknowledge it. The spending is astounding!

From 2019 through 2024, Pekau and his board spent an astonishing $6,748,203 on in-house and outside law firms. That averages $1.1 million a year in legal fees, not including huge bills this year. (Pekau was elected in 2017 but did not take control of the board’s trustees until 2019)

About $351,000 was spent for outside attorneys to sue two critics on the Police force, Orland Park Police Sergeants Ken Kovac and William Sanchez. Click here to read details on Pekau’s massive legal spending from 2019 (when he took control of the board) until 2024.

Both cases were thrown out by the courts in favor of the police defendants, professionals who spent their lives protecting Orland Park residents (not playing politics and kissing Pekau’s ass). Pekau ordered his attorneys to appeal the judge’s rulings.

So much for his alleged support of the Orland Park Police Department.

But that’s not all of Pekau’s wasteful law firm spending. He spent nearly $300,000 to fight requests for information on how he spends money and challenge rulings against him by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.

So much for Pekau’s alleged “transparency.”

Here’s the breakdown of legal spending to fight Raoul’s decisions:
2019 – $44,580.80;
2020 – $48,202.00;
2021 – $38,791.63;
2022 – $44,493.60;
2023 – $35,639.50;
2024 – $55,944.47;
2025 - $7,361.00 (one month)

To deflect from this wasteful spending, Pekau continues to lie that a TIF approved by the former McLaughlin administration has caused a $47 million loss. In fact, an analysis of the TIF spending since Pekau took control of the board shows the majority of that money was lost while he was mayor making decisions.

I laughed as I watched the interim village manager try to explain it but was repeatedly interrupted by Pekau who offered his political spin attacking School District 230 and 135 for not accepting his TIF plans.

I laughed even harder when I read Pekau’s twisted effort to explain the massive spending to block FOIAs posted on his eNews”LITTER” and his “blog” — Pekau likes to denigrate “blogs” as a way to suggest they are not as trustworthy as his own politically motivated lies. But as many of my followers know, many of the columns posted here are published in local community newspapers including The Regional News Newspaper in Orland Park, the Des Plaines Valley News, and the Southwest News Newspaper Group among other papers.

Essentially, Pekau was flinging more political mud at Jim Dodge, whose candidacy to unseat Pekau has him on the run. Pekau is trailing in the polling. Pekau claims “That is not remotely true” but then acknowledges that the money was in fact spent on those matters.

To fog up the issue, Pekau distorts what Dodge and others have stated, asserting they say it was spent on “a single” case to block the release of information. In fact, everyone who have raised this excessive and typical Pekau wasteful spending argues it covers several battles by Pekau to block FOIA requests, not just one.

And then he admits it was several battles with the Illinois ATtorneyGeneral, writing:

”That $275,000 figure wasn’t from a single case—it’s the TOTAL legal costs associated with ALL FOIA requests and Attorney General reviews from 2019 to today.”

Incredulously, Pekau argues that responding to Freedom of Information Act requests is a waste of money. No one fights the transparency more than Pekau with one hand and then lies about it with another hand.

Pekau’s bad financial decisions are driven by politics. It leads many to believe that’s why he didn’t file the Village Annual Financial Disclosure statements for 2022 and 2023. (He filed 2022 only after I exposed his failing.)

If it were just these financial problems, one might say he is bad at math. It’s more than that.

Orland Park homeowners can see his poor financial leadership in every village charge they face. Look at your recent water bills.

Pekau dramatically increased the water rate (and associated fees for garbage, stormwater service, the village service charge, and sewer service) by almost 10 percent.

Pekau dramatically raised the utility and sales tax, too.

His political mailers are filled with lies, like when he asserts he raised the number of police officers from 96 in 2016 to 121. (Remember, he didn’t have any control until 2019, three years later.)

Pekau loves to wrap himself around and exploit police, first responders and veterans to deflect from his failed leadership.

Pekau is planning three more TIFs to boost his revenues. Remember, a TIF (Tax Increment Finance District) takes all the property taxes collected for all government agencies like the village, schools, parks, fire district, and library and redirects the tax revenue to the mayor to spend on whatever he wants, for the life of the TIF (35 years).

If Pekau adds 500 new homes in a TIF district, as he said in his most recent political speech at the last village board meeting, the property taxes won’t go to cover the educational needs of the new students who he said will “flood the schools,” but will instead go to him and the developers.

Pekau will spend the TIF tax money as he likes, helping the landowner clean up toxic hazards.

Pekau mocked the schools saying they need to take remedial math.

There have been no public hearings on the three new TIFs by Pekau. They will just be a fait accompli, to meet his needs, not the needs of Orland Taxpayers.

It is clear that Pekau is allergic not only to telling the truth, but he is clearly even more extremely allergic to transparency, too. Apparently, it’s just not in his political being to tell the taxpayers the truth as he wastefully spends their hard-earned money.