A written message sent by an Illinois Department of Transportation technician reached Evanston's chief financial officer on April 21, flagging questions about $3.9 million that had moved out of the city's gas tax fund. Documentation technician Ami Wenz of IDOT put Evanston on notice in a written communication reviewed by a news outlet, stating that any transfers the city was unable to account for would need to be paid back.
Documents obtained through records requests show that city staff kept the City Council uninformed about the funding shortfall as they worked to reconcile unaccounted-for money and submitted paperwork that had gone unfiled for years. Throughout that period, IDOT was conducting what both agencies described as a routine audit and had been sending the city a series of notices since that spring, each pointing to a larger fiscal gap than the one before, including a mid-May communication from Wenz indicating the city might owe the Motor Fuel Tax account in the millions. On occasion, the explanations offered by city staff differed from what IDOT had put in writing to the city, and a separate IDOT assessment documenting the extent of the matter was not made available to the Council.
A Motor Fuel Tax covering gasoline, diesel, and kerosene applies to fuel transactions throughout Illinois. A share of that revenue flows to municipalities to fund local road projects, though spending is subject to approval by IDOT. Records show that Evanston drew on those state funds over an extended period without the required authorisation in place.
According to IDOT's financial records, Evanston's Motor Fuel Tax account was projected to hold roughly $24.4 million by the close of 2024. The municipality's available funds at that point amounted to roughly $7 million. About $17.4 million in questioned expenditures covered road work and maintenance contracts that proceeded without state authorization, along with additional transfers whose paper trail IDOT was unable to reconstruct.
From the start of the current year, questions about the unexplained discrepancy had been directed by Ald. Clare Kelly (1st) toward city staff. Roughly a year before the matter came before her, a bond approval request tied to infrastructure work had arrived at Council through city staff, establishing her familiarity with the MFT fund. When Kelly raised the question of using Motor Fuel Tax funds for the project, staff indicated that the balance in that account had dropped to only a few million dollars.
Unsatisfied with how the municipality had handled her inquiries, Kelly reached out to IDOT that January. State records conveyed to her that Evanston's account balance appeared to be tens of millions of dollars below where it should have been — a gap she later characterized to a news outlet as well outside any routine delay, noting that a shortfall in the range of one, two, or three million dollars might fall within normal bounds, but not one approaching twenty.
At the January Administration and Public Works Committee gathering, Alderman Kelly put a question to Assistant City Engineer Chris Sous about why the state's recorded balance and the city's own figures did not match. Sous responded that the difference represented funds the state intended to transfer to Evanston at a later date, though documentation reviewed afterward showed the gap traced back to millions of dollars in prior city expenditures that IDOT had not authorized. Prior to joining the city, Sous had accumulated over eight years of engineering work at IDOT.
At a Finance and Budget Committee gathering that February, Kelly put the matter back on the table. Desai, the city's CFO and treasurer, echoed the position put forward by Sous — describing the funds as money that had not yet come under the city's ownership — while Kelly pushed back, noting that the balance reflected monthly deposits the city had been receiving on a regular basis. Desai went on to characterize the comparison between the two balances as fundamentally flawed, likening it to measuring unlike things against each other, before the committee's presiding alderman, Rodgers, brought the exchange to a close.
Beyond the $3.9 million whose movement could not be accounted for, Wenz's April 21 correspondence to Desai laid out a broader pattern of procedural lapses in how the city managed its MFT account, among them the practice of moving funds into other municipal accounts without proper authorisation. Wenz put the city on notice that its procedures required revision, adding in her written communication that improper adherence to MFT protocols stood to produce shortfalls and expenditures deemed ineligible, potentially reaching into the millions.
Desai passed the message along to four other city staff members within hours, asking in the note whether both financial and operational concerns could be addressed and urging that a conversation take place before any Motor Fuel Tax funds were drawn down in 2026. Nine days later, by April 30, Wenz told staff the city had chosen not to place a listing in IDOT's Notice to Contractors Bulletin, a statewide publication through which contractors locate public road work projects available for bidding.
Under state regulations, any municipal contract drawing on MFT funding and valued above $25,000 is to appear in the bulletin. According to both state and city documentation, fewer than half a dozen projects appeared in the bulletin between 2020 and the present, while upward of twelve contracts drawing on MFT funding went forward without the required public advertisement. In a communication to city staff, Wenz indicated that the practice fell outside what the rules permitted and that repayment of those contracts would, by strict interpretation, be required.
Vargas, speaking on behalf of the city, maintained that bid advertising had followed state law as written, and that IDOT had reviewed the city's procurement approach and found it met the relevant selection standards. By May 13, Wenz had asked the city to halt further transfers out of the MFT fund until the outstanding matters were resolved, noting in a written communication that she wanted to avoid any growth in the deficiencies while the questions were being worked through.
On June 4, a completed audit document — logged internally as "Documentation Review No. 69" and covering the city's MFT fund — was transmitted by Wenz via email to City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza. A review of spending records spanning January 2018 through December 2024 turned up $17.4 million in outlays that had never received authorisation, among them nearly $5.1 million with no traceable connection to any project.
Six days after Wenz put staff on notice that unresolved deficiencies could trigger a reimbursement requirement, and after IDOT's cover letter called for the review to go before the Mayor and City Council at their first regular meeting following receipt, Mendoza sent a response indicating she would place the matter on the agenda for the next scheduled meeting, with City Manager Luke Stowe included on the correspondence. In a separate message to Stowe, she conveyed optimism that Document Review No. 69 would reach a favorable resolution before its scheduled presentation to Council.
On June 15, Wenz directed city officials — Mendoza and Stowe among them — to bring supplemental resolutions before Council at the earliest opportunity, covering road work projects whose final costs had exceeded the amounts councilmembers had initially authorized. Mendoza had committed in an Aug. 21 email to placing those supplemental resolutions on the September 14th City Council agenda alongside Documentation Review No. 69, yet across the six Council sessions held after that initial response, neither the documentation review nor the two outstanding supplemental resolutions appeared on any of the meeting agendas.
According to Kelly, a copy of the review came into her possession only after her legal representatives sent the city a formal demand letter on her behalf. Following that, municipal staff produced a disclosure package running to upwards of 30,000 pages — spanning email correspondence, banking records, and assorted other materials, among them the item catalogued as Documentation Review No. 69.
At a Finance and Budget Committee session on July 8, Deputy CFO Clayton Black pointed to IDOT as the source of the problem, telling committee members the state agency had fallen a substantial number of years behind in processing the city's outstanding expense reimbursements. Documentation pointed to Evanston having fallen behind schedule by several years — a delay that predated any state-level involvement.
Between January 2020 and late June 2025, state transportation authorities granted the city clearance to draw on its motor fuel tax funds on just two occasions, both tied to pre-existing projects, with the repeated gaps in approval tracing back to paperwork that Evanston had not submitted to the state. Five projects wrapped up between 2020 and 2024 prompted the city to submit the required state paperwork that June, ahead of a government-imposed filing cutoff.
During the July 8 Finance and Budget Committee session, Desai told attendees that staff had been holding ongoing discussions with IDOT and that greater clarity on the matter was anticipated within roughly two months. Those remarks made no mention of a documentation review received approximately four weeks earlier, which had put the city's unapproved balance at $17.4 million.
A joint ordinance was put forward by Kelly alongside Rodgers and Alderman Thomas Suffredin of the 6th Ward. The proposal would direct the city to post Motor Fuel Tax-funded contract notices through IDOT's official bulletin. During the Referrals Committee gathering held on August 24, Sous indicated that the city follows this practice as a matter of routine.
In an Aug. 27 message addressed to Sous, Desai, and City Engineer Lara Biggs, Kelly put her concerns on record — stating that what she characterized as a recurring pattern of inaccurate information from those three officials about the MFT Fund was undermining her capacity to carry out her responsibilities to residents. This followed three earlier emails sent to Stowe and Evanston Police Chief Schenita Stewart, who was also serving at the time as acting deputy city manager. Nothing in the record was amended or retracted.
A single consolidated disbursement of $9.1 million, issued by IDOT in 2017, brought nearly two decades' worth of documentation gaps to a close. A 2019 review flagged missing Bureau of Local Roads forms and procedural gaps in Motor Fuel Tax handling, and a state official communicated in an April 30 email that lump sum authorizations would no longer be granted. IDOT has since retroactively approved a portion of the contested MFT expenditures and permitted the city to offset undocumented costs by substituting other MFT-eligible line items, including maintenance work and staff payroll.
Kelly described the expense reclassification as a manoeuvre that went around Council without its knowledge, telling a broadcast outlet that the arrangement lacked both transparency and democratic process.
Records show the $3.9 million gap was ultimately resolved, with the bulk of those funds traced to a transfer into a separate investment vehicle in 2021, followed by a further move into a newly established MFT account two years on. That account reached IDOT only in September, and it ran counter to what a city employee had previously stated — namely, that the funds had been directed toward an entirely separate account.
Vargas indicated that coordination with IDOT was underway to bring all paperwork into compliance for projects drawing on MFT funds, in whole or in part, and that revised resolutions were set to come before the City Council on Oct. 26. A written statement from Vargas added that Evanston intended to meet every applicable law, regulation, and policy governing how MFT funds are used in street improvement work across the city.
A substantial portion of MFT-related spending had yet to be accounted for. In a September 1 email addressed to city staff, Wenz noted that roughly $4 million more remained unattributable to any specific project, adding that, absent other qualifying expenditures, the MFT account would be owed that sum.
The audit, which IDOT had indicated would wrap up by late August, remained in progress. In a statement dated September 30, an IDOT spokesperson told a news outlet that Evanston had demonstrated a track record of responsible management of Motor Fuel Tax funds. No revised timeline for the audit was provided at that time.
