Tonight’s Board of Trustees meeting will be the first official meeting for the village’s new engineering firm, Trotter & Associates. We look forward to seeing their approach to municipal engineering and we hope that taxpayers will benefit from lowered costs and fresh ideas.
While researching future content for the Observer, we stumbled across some interesting correspondence regarding Barrington Hills Farm (BHFW LLC) and our village’s former engineering firm, Gewalt Hamilton. What we found is shocking, but it certainly makes the Village’s decision last year to change engineering companies very wise indeed.
According to documents found on McHenry County’s website, in December 2015, BHFW’s Chairman J. R. Davis was applying to McHenry County to convert part of an existing wetland on the property into a recreational pond. As a result, some mitigation of the wetlands was necessary. The specifics of the mitigation and request for credits from the Wetland Restoration Fund are not important.
What is important is the engineering firm that BHFW had hired to create their Wetland Mitigation Plan was Gewalt Hamilton. And not just Gewalt Hamilton, but Dan Strahan himself , who was Barrington Hills’ Village Engineer at the time, was personally involved in the project.
Strahan is cc’ed on the Gewalt Hamilton letter to McHenry County on behalf of BHFW and Strahan’s signature even appears with Davis’ signature on the Wetland Restoration Fund application as the Design Engineer.
To be clear, this was a project undertaken by a private property owner in unincorporated McHenry County immediately adjacent to the Village, and Strahan and Gewalt Hamilton were hired by that individual. All at the same time when Strahan and Gewalt Hamilton were also employed by the Village of Barrington Hills.
We find it shocking that Gewalt Hamilton and Dan Strahan did not decline employment by BHFW & Mr. Davis in 2015, seeing as the firm had been serving Barrington Hills for decades. Gewalt Hamilton & Strahan were well aware of the history of the Davis property, and in all likelihood would be called up by the Village to consult on the property in the future. It would be bad enough for any engineer employed by Gewalt Hamilton to have taken this job, let alone Dan Strahan.
Not surprisingly, Strahan indeed did end up personally involved in discussions on behalf of the Village regarding new driveways and dedicated easements and right-of ways for the proposed HARPS facility on BHFW property in 2016 & 2017. It certainly gives us pause to wonder about the quality of the service the village and taxpayers received on that assignment.
Did Strahan and Gewalt ever divulge to the Village of Barrington Hills that they had been previously employed by Davis?
How could Strahan and Gewalt maintain any impartiality when they had been paid by both the Village and Davis?
Are there other projects that Gewalt has worked on for Davis and BHFW?
Did Strahan and Gewalt ever divulge this conflict of interest while they were applying for retention as the Village’s engineering firm?
Right now, we have more questions than answers. We’ll leave it to our readers to draw their own conclusions. We think the documents speak for themselves.
Click on the following links to view the complete PDFs of the documents BHFarm_Gewalt_Wetland_1 and BHFarm_Gewalt_Wetland_2.
