Will County Gazette

DuPage Township Trustee Alyssia Benford has turned to the state Board of Elections to clarify whatever connections a $10,000 advance in salary to Township Supervisor William Mayer might have had with a $10,000 transfer from his campaign account.

An April 17, 2017, campaign report showed that $10,000 from Citizens to Elect William Mayer was transferred to Alyssa Pincuspy, a 16-year-old neighbor of Mayer. The transfer was made in January 2017. On Sept. 4, 2018, Mayer’s campaign records were amended to show that the money was transferred not to Pincuspy but to “Citizens to Elect DuPage Township Award Winning Slate,” a campaign committee that included Benford and other local elected officials.

Mayer told the Will County Gazette that once he realized the error in his campaign records, he corrected it.

William Mayer

“The original two posts (pertaining to the account) were coded incorrectly and were ‘transferred out’ to an Alyssa Pincuspy by mistake,” Mayer wrote in an email. “However, please note that it was done as a transfer out which would mean another campaign account—clearly you can tell this was done in error.”

Benford said she became aware of the transfer of funds while she was investigating $10,000 advance payments to Mayer “that were showing up all over the place.”

She discovered the $10,000 payment to Pincuspy in a check of campaign finance records for Mayer compiled by IllinoisSunshine.org, and she realized the amount was the same as the advance paid to Mayer.

Last week, she filed a complaint with the state Board of Elections detailing Mayer’s transactions and asking for an investigation to “ensure there was no wrongdoing.”

Benford said that once she made the discovery of the payment, in August, she texted Township Trustee Maripat Oliver asking if she thought the payment was odd.

‘I initiated the conversation [with Oliver] on purpose because someone had informed me that Trustee Oliver had been sharing the details of our conversations and my concerns about the financial activity at DuPage Township without my consent,” she wrote in her complaint to the elections board.

The same day that Benford texted Oliver, Mayer amended his campaign records to show the funds went to Citizens to Elect DuPage Township Award Winning Slate and not Pincuspy.

Benford was treasurer of that campaign committee until June 2018.

“I wrote a letter requesting my removal as treasurer because of my concerns regarding Supervisor Mayer and some financial activity at DuPage Township,” Benford wrote in her complaint.

She added that she never made any deposits, wrote any checks or made any transfers in or out of Citizens to Elect DuPage Township Award Winning Slate.

“All transactions for this account were handled by William Mayer,” she wrote in the complaint.

Oliver did not respond to a request for comment about the text messages she received from Benford.