Richard Blass, far left, cross-examining Chief Talley, middle, during Friday’s administrative hearing. Officer Cordova sits in front wearing the brown coat. Photo by Michael Romain for the Village Free Press.

Monday, November 10, 2014 || By Michael Romain || Updated: 5:10 PM

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Friday’s hearing may have set up a battle between the village and the officers’ union reps

MAYWOOD || The two Maywood police officers who were issued citations for driving without seat belts while on duty were found not guilty during an administrative hearing last Friday.

On September 9, Maywood Police Chief Valdimir Talley ordered his deputy chief, Elijah Willis, and another officer to write traffic tickets for Officers Sergio Cordova and Brandon Hawkins. The Chief said that he’d observed the two on-duty officers not wearing seat belts while he was traveling eastbound on Madison Street that day.

The two officers were issued municipal citations under local ordinance 71.09, which requires the use of safety belts in motor vehicles with certain exceptions, such as drivers operating vehicles in reverse, drivers with written medical explanations of why they can’t wear the belts and drivers of vehicles with model years prior to 1965, among others. Drivers who fail to follow the requirement may be fined up to $100.

Although Maywood’s police officers aren’t exempt from wearing seat belts in the village’s code of ordinances, they are exempt from wearing safety belts in the Illinois Vehicle Code (IVC).

Illinois State Representative Don Moffitt (R-Gilson), who sponsored a bill exempting police from wearing seat belts while requiring firefighters to wear them (the bill was signed into law by Gov. Quinn last year), claimed that the police need the flexibility to quickly jump out of cars if a foot chase ensues or they need to quickly exit the vehicle and draw their weapons.

Talley said that the state statute is contradictory to current statistics and argued in front of the Village Board of Trustees at an October 29, Legal License and Ordinance Committee (LLOC) meeting for the local code of ordinances to be changed to effectively exempt Maywood police from the state’s exemption. In other words, police across the state may not have to wear seat belts, but those in Maywood do.

The Chief said that he was motivated to press for the ordinance change due to officer safety and the possibility that the village could be held liable if an officer were injured or killed in an accident in which he or she wasn’t wearing a safety belt. He also noted that the move would increase professionalism among the department and smoothen the path to national accreditation, a goal the Chief hopes the department can achieve within seven years.

On November 5, the Maywood Board of Trustees voted to change the local ordinance to reflect the local exemption from the IVC. At the hearing last Friday, the village argued that, even though the Board passed a local exemption to the state’s exemption months after Talley ordered the tickets to be written, the village’s Home Rule powers nonetheless gives it the authority to enforce its own ordinance — despite the fact that it may be contradictory to the IVC statute that the village adopted.

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Judge Pamela Harris, however, didn’t agree.

“When you incorporate the [Illinois Vehicle Code] by reference, you specifically incorporate any changes that are also made to that section that you incorporate into the village’s ordinance,” she said.

“By incorporating the [IVC] by reference, [Board members] don’t know what changes are going to be made to the [IVC], so when they make those particular changes, they’re automatically incorporated by reference, unless you specifically have something changed to your ordinance….specifically exempting or prohibiting that,” she said. “Just imagine how many changes are made to the code on a day-to-day or year-to-year basis.”

Richard F. Blass, counsel for the Illinois Council of Police who represented the two ticketed officers at the hearing, implied that the village was abusing its Home Rule authority.

“I’ve never agreed with municipalities using Home Rule powers as a shield,” said Blass, who is also a retired Bellwood police officer. “In this case, they’re using it as a sword to go after two police officers.”

Blass argued that the tickets should be thrown out on the grounds that, by adopting the IVC, the village implicitly adopted the state’s safety belt exemption for police officers, and also because the police chief ordered the tickets to be written by officers who did not themselves witness the violations.

Judge Harris said that, based on the preponderance of evidence, the officers weren’t guilty. The village reserves the right to appeal her decision, but Talley indicated that that wouldn’t happen.

Regardless of what the village does, however, it appears that Friday’s hearing may have been only one chapter of a longer saga regarding these tickets.

Blass said during an interview conducted today that he plans on filing a grievance against the village based on the Labor Act. He said that the Board shouldn’t have voted on an ordinance change without bargaining with the union, since the change entails an alteration of working conditions.

Chief Talley, however, said that the ordinance change is not a labor issue.

“This is a matter of village policy,” he said. “A union cannot dictate what a village can have,” Talley said, also noting that the Board only changed the language of the ordinance — it didn’t actually change [the spirit of the] ordinance.”

“The village will have to suspend that ordinance,” insisted Blass, who claimed to have learned about the ordinance change on the day of the hearing. He said that if the village doesn’t suspend the ordinance, the opposing parties may be back in court again — only this time, they may be on different sides of the room. VFP

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