CHICAGO — A former water department official for the southwest suburban Village of Crestwood has been convicted of lying repeatedly to environmental regulators for more than 20 years about using a water well to supplement the village’s drinking water supply from Lake Michigan.
Theresa Neubauer, 55, of Crestwood, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of the 11 counts of making false statements. U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall set sentencing tentatively for October 2.
Neubauer, currently Crestwood’s police chief on leave, was found guilty of all 11 counts of making false statements by a federal jury after a week-long trial. A co-defendant, Frank Scaccia, 61, of Crestwood, the village’s retired certified water operator, pleaded guilty on April 11 to making false statements and is also awaiting sentencing.
The charges did not allege, and the trial did not seek to establish, that the defendants’ false statements in regulatory reports concealing the use of well water resulted in any harm to Crestwood’s nearly 11,000 residents or to the environment, but the concealment avoided regulations requiring that Crestwood test its commingled water supply and monitor the amount of certain contaminants.
“Nobody really knows what was in the water for all those years because [Neubauer’s] lies defeated testing,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Chapman said in his closing argument.
Neubauer concealed the village’s use of its well from the government and the citizens of Crestwood to save money, prosecutors argued to the jury. By doing so, the village didn’t have to fix its leaking water distribution system, pay the neighboring Village of Alsip more money for water drawn from Lake Michigan, and properly monitor for contaminants that could have been introduced to Crestwood’s water supply.
“The charges in this case are seemingly technical reporting violations. But the lies in those reports evidenced a calloused disregard for the welfare and safety of the citizens of Crestwood by their public officials. The decades’ long scheme proved at trial through the efforts of special agents of the U.S. EPA is a disheartening reminder of what can happen when public officials and employees put their own interests ahead of the people they were supposed to serve,” said Gary S. Shapiro, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
The evidence at trial showed that since at least 1973, the substantial majority of Crestwood’s drinking water came from Lake Michigan and was purchased from neighboring Alsip, which, in turn, had purchased the water from the City of Chicago after it was treated and tested pursuant to state and federal environmental regulations. Since 1982, Crestwood regularly supplemented the Lake Michigan water with water drawn from an underground aquifer through a well located on Playfield Drive, known as Well #1. Crestwood found it necessary to supplement the Lake Michigan water with water pumped from Well #1, in part, because of substantial leakage in its water distribution system, which Crestwood officials failed to adequately repair.
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Key Facts
- State: Illinois
- Category: Public Corruption|Environmental Crimes
- Source: DOJ Press Release â†â€â€
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