The Champaign County Board held an unusual meeting yesterday with only one agenda item: “Response to FOIA Request”.

The FOIA request which prompted this meeting came from an email address bearing the name Cookie Cutter:

“Hello, I am requesting the following information under the freedom of information act –
All HR issues involving George Danos since January 2023 and a record of how many times he has accessed the county financial banking system and accounts for the same time period.”

The request was directed to the County on March 27^th, 2024, and the April 3^rd response contained 15 pages of records describing numerous allegations against Champaign County Auditor George Danos, including inappropriate images on his work computer.

The April 4^th meeting agenda along with the FOIA request and responsive records can be seen here and at the bottom of this article.

The records also show allegations related to an improper travel reimbursement by Danos, and a list of instances where the (unnamed) accuser claimed that Danos frequently failed to perform duties related to his office, in addition to creating an abusive work environment.

As a result, the Champaign County State’s Attorney Office requested a forensic search of Dano’s computer.  The search of his entire hard drive revealed “numerous files which could be construed as pornographic”, and Danos apparently agreed to remove those.

The County Board meeting discussion of the results of this FOIA request remained rather enigmatic and tended to avoid the matter of pornography, perhaps because there is little to no precedent for regulating such conduct by an elected official, and perhaps because matters related to a general failure to perform official duties were far more concerning than a few naughty pictures.  The claims that Danos had not accessed County financial records with any regularity was a strong indicator, according to some Board members, that he was not doing his job as Auditor.

It isn’t entirely clear what, if anything, will result from any of this – elected officials have an incredible amount of individual agency in how they perform their duties and run their offices, and Danos currently runs uncontested in the 2024 election cycle.

The full April 4^th, 2024 special meeting of the Champaign County Board is provided below.  Danos attended the meeting in the audience section, but did not speak.