Cook County Commissioner Kisha McCaskill (5th) was approved for a consultant contract with the Harvey Public Library District. Board president Anthony McCaskill is her husband.
By Amethyst J. Davis, Harvey World Herald
Note: This story was originally published in the Harvey World Herald. Sign up for their free email newsletter: https://harveyworld.org/newsletter/.
A newly minted county commissioner has brought in tens of thousands of dollars working at the library where her husband now serves as board president.
In October 2023, the Harvey Public Library District board voted to give Kisha McCaskill, wife of then-treasurer Anthony McCaskill, a six-and-a-half-month consulting contract, compensated at $2,000 per month, working 20 hours a week. The contract for her company, KHM Consulting Group Incorporated, expired in May 2024.
Still, Kisha McCaskill, appointed to the county board’s 5th district seat representing the south suburbs and several neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side in January, performs and receives payments for work for the library district, which has included providing recommendations for full-time hires, liaising for accounts payable, and reviewing proposals for security-related contracts.
She’s requested to be paid $30,450 for administrative work and reimbursed $5,164.57 for expenses she incurred between November 2023 and February 2025, according to invoices and bills lists reviewed by the HWH.
Kisha McCaskill was brought on to perform “executive-level” work for the library, according to the contract, which also stipulated “the Library shall not reimburse the Consultant for expenses related to the services as such costs are included in the fee.”
The contract called for her assistance with “strategic planning and development, organizational assessment and improvement, program evaluation and enhancement, leadership and team development, change management and transformation initiatives, and human resource matters.”
She was to assist the then-interim library director Kim Peake and other staff with their own work, including preparing financial statements for board review. The HPLD has not had a director since at least August 2024, according to state records, and the board isn’t currently conducting a search to fill that role.
In Illinois, library trustees are an unpaid position, meaning Anthony McCaskill does not receive compensation. Neither Kisha McCaskill nor her publicist Sean Howard responded to request for comment as to whether her work at the library presents a conflict of interest or gives the appearance of impropriety.
Anthony McCaskill now serves as president after the board reorganized in September 2024. According to the meeting minutes from the night library leadership approved Kisha McCaskill’s contract, he voted to “sustain” his wife’s contract, according to library records. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Minutes also show trustee Charwana Morgan voted to “sustain.” However, her vote related to Kisha McCaskill’s contract has always been no or abstain, Morgan said, and that she “never agreed with them paying her,” citing inconsistencies in board records. Then-secretary Chapelle Hooks, who voted to approve the agreement, did not respond to requests for comment. Now-deceased trustee JoAnn Nesbitt and Tamika Price also voted to approve. Price did not respond to requests for comment.
Former trustee Monique Williams voiced concerns about the agreement, she said. However, the contract was stressed as necessary to continue operations, Williams said, and with that in mind, she voted yes. But after so long, Williams said, she didn’t feel comfortable as it did not appear there was an “exit strategy” following contract expiration.
During a consulting contract review in May 2024, then-president Tamika Price acknowledged the expiration of at least one contract, but explained “regular staff have to be in place before consultants and temporary workers can be dismissed.”
As of February, the board made strides to finalize part and full-time hires, after months in which independent contractors and temporary workers had made up roles after several terminations were made at the HPLD.
Library attorneys did not respond to requests for comment as to when, if at all, Kisha McCaskill would cease working at the HPLD following those appointments.
The McCaskill family is commonly associated with the Harvey Park District. Kisha McCaskill serves as its executive director, and her husband once served as board president. Son Aaron and daughter Amari are current park district commissioners. Anthony McCaskill is running for Harvey School District 152 school board in the April elections.
Harvey’s library bylaws don’t explicitly bar familial relationships in contracts and government appointments. According to the trustee code of ethics in the library’s bylaws on the website, which are modeled after the American Library Trustee Association’s ethics code, a trustee is required to “disqualify himself/herself immediately whenever the appearance or a conflict of interest exists.”
Ethical dilemmas, public perception, and reform
Government can be opaque. Low meeting attendance from the public and the absence of a watchdog presence from the state government makes it harder to reform local units — even after major scandals, said Melissa Mouritsen, professor at College of DuPage whose specialties include suburban politics.
“When you have relatives or multiple people from the same family, that’s an ethical issue,” Mouritsen said, “and not necessarily a corruption issue.” Governing bodies can adopt their own policies to prevent the appearance of impropriety, Mouritsen said.
“People will think that the fix is in,” Mouritsen said about how that behavior erodes the public’s trust in local politics, “and then they won’t participate; it’ll depress participation even more.” When “crossing these ethical lines” becomes normal, she warned, “then taking another step further doesn’t seem so bad. It’s like velocitation, almost: you don’t realize just what you’re doing because you’re so sort of caught up in it.”
Mouritsen once co-authored an University of Illinois at Chicago study into suburban political wrongdoing, which suggested the state or county finance a suburban inspector general to oversee Chicago’s suburbs.
The study also suggested municipalities enter an intergovernmental agreement with one another to respectively contribute .1 percent of their budgets to create an inspector general’s office. But that assumes buy-in from the local governments the inspector would be tasked with investigating.
Those in positions of power are not incentivized to support ethics reform work, said Alisa Kaplan, Executive Director of Reform for Illinois, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group.
“The biggest obstacle to the type of political reform that we advocate for is that the people you’re asking to change the rules are already invested in keeping the status quo,” on a fundamental level. “Citizen initiatives,” such as ballot referenda, Kaplan said, are a tool for people to “bypass the people that are invested in that status quo.”
Even with Illinois’ particular hostility toward citizen-led initiatives, Kaplan said, “the only way to guarantee that nothing will change is not to try.”
