By Townhall Chicago News Staff
John Kraft, co-founder of the Edgar County Watchdogs, is tracking two active cases involving Illinois public officials and agencies that he says have avoided scrutiny.
Kraft, an investigative journalist who publishes through the group’s Illinois Leaks platform, says the two cases raise questions about whether state and local rules are being followed.
Kraft served 22 years in the United States Army before retiring and turning to public-records journalism, co-founding the Edgar County Watchdogs with fellow veteran Kirk Allen around 2011. The group has since built a record of filing open-records requests and attending public meetings to examine local and state government conduct, work that led to its current reporting on the two cases.
The first case involves Matthew Coates, whom Gov. JB Pritzker appointed to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board in 2022. Kraft says Coates is now running for village trustee in Normal, a salaried public office that state law bars Prisoner Review Board members from holding at the same time. Coates earns $115,000 a year on the board, according to Kraft. When he was first appointed to the board, Coates resigned from a Bloomfield School District post and a seat on the McLean County Board, which Kraft says shows he was already aware of the restriction. Kraft says Coates’ economic interest statement for the village trustee race disclosed his Prisoner Review Board income but did not list the position itself in the section where state law requires it.
The second case centers on the Crawford Memorial Public Hospital District, which Kraft says continues to operate a clinic in Newton, in neighboring Jasper County, outside the district’s own statutory service area. Kraft says Illinois law requires a public referendum before a hospital district can operate outside its home county, and no such vote was held. He says the district had also planned a second clinic outside the county and spent money on architectural and engineering work before quietly canceling those plans. Two of the district’s board members will not continue after their current terms expire, Kraft says.
Kraft holds memberships in Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Chicago Headline Club. His past reporting with the Edgar County Watchdogs includes coverage of spending and contracting at the College of DuPage, work that was cited in state legislative proceedings and drew a subpoena in a former college president’s civil lawsuit.
More information on the group’s reporting is available at edgarcountywatchdogs.com.
