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Located on Old Grand Ave. in Gurnee, the mayor recently vetoed a measure to place the bronze statue.
photo by Ryan Hosler

By David Weese
Staff writer

Gurnee Trustee Kirk Morris has sued his own village on behalf of the PFC Geoffrey Morris Foundation over the rights to build a war memorial called the Heroes of Freedom (HOF) Memorial on a plot of land donated by the village back in 2005. PFC Morris was Kirk Morris’ son.
The memorial was originally started when it was discovered that six soldiers from the Gurnee area lost their lives on Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has since grown to be a regional memorial dedicated to all those who paid the ultimate price in those conflicts.
The original soldiers from Gurnee included Marine PFC Geoffrey Morris; Marine Sgt. Edward Davis; Army Sgt. Jason Denfrund; Army Capt. Shane Mahaffee; Marine Lance Cpl. Sean Maher and Army SPC Wesley Wells.
Presently there are only flagpoles erected at the site, but eventually a platform will be built and a sculpture done by artist Cindy Seng will be installed, among other amenities. The site itself was designed by professional architect Daniel Robison.
But a struggle has arisen between Kirk and Gurnee Mayor Kristina Kovarik over who will control the site and determine what will be built there. So far, Kirk says his foundation has invested $200,000 into the site, and his lawsuit is seeking to either recover the money the foundation has invested in the project or be allowed to bring the project to completion.
“All we’re trying to do with the suit is say, ‘Either issue us the permits like you’re supposed to and get out of the way and let us build this the way it was designed, …or rescind the resolution you passed way back in March of 2005, take possession of the site, and you have to pay us for the improvement we’ve done there.’”
The lawsuit was filed in Lake County Circuit Court on Feb. 11 by O’Donnell Law Firm, Ltd. on behalf of Kirk Morris and the PFC Geoffrey Morris Foundation. Mayor Kristina Kovarik and the Village of Gurnee are named as defendants.
Kirk says that last fall, he was informed by the mayor that “the project was being taken away from him,” and that nothing more was to be done on the project until an agreement was passed by the village board.
Kirk said that Kovarik called the contractors he had retained to do the scheduled work at the site and told them, “I’m the mayor, and we’re going in a different direction, and Mr. Morris is no longer going to be controlling the project. We’re going to come up with a different plan,’ so those contractors pulled off the job,” he said
It is unclear on what grounds Kovarick called the original contractors and told them their services would no longer be needed or why she stopped work on the project. The suit is alleging that she was outside of her rights and powers to do so, as the memorial was being built per the resolution passed by the village board in 2005, and the board had taken no action on the matter since then.
Morris said he went to get permits to install permanent lighting, only to find out those permits were not going to be issued per Kovarik’s instructions. Shortly after, Kovarik called Morris about the situation.
The Labor News was able to obtain a recording of a voice-mail Kovarick left on Kirk’s phone. “….I understand that you attempted to get an electrical permit or you came with your electrician yesterday to complete electrical work, and I thought that we had an understanding that you understood that there was to be no more work on this project anymore until we’ve gone before the board and put some new agreements in place, so I’ve instructed staff that we are not issuing any new permits on that site until we have a new design and a new plan and we know who is doing what.”
After Kovarik cancelled the permits, negotiations between staff and the foundation went on for about two and one-half months before a written agreement was hammered out. The foundation put together a development agreement that included architectural and engineering plans and cost estimates. On Dec. 21, that agreement was passed unanimously by the village board. Kovarik voiced no objections at that point.
That agreement included a timetable that gave the foundation an additional 10 years to complete the project, after which it would be removed from the project and the village would take over.
But at the next meeting of the village board, which was Jan.4, Kovarik vetoed the agreement. That veto was upheld by a vote of 3 – 2 at the Jan. 25 board meeting. Morris recused himself on both votes.
“It was her agreement.” Morris said. “She brokered it; she pulled it together; she brought it to the board in December and all five trustees voted for it.” Morris said that Trustee Mike Jacobs even praised the agreement and said how good it was that all sides could come together on the project and get things clearly spelled out on paper.
After the Jan. 25 meeting when the board voted to uphold the mayor’s veto, Morris went to the site, took down the flags and shut off the lights in protest. The lights have since been turned back on and the flags have been replaced.
Morris said that the lawsuit was the “absolute last resort,” and that the foundation felt it was their only recourse to protect the project. He said if the mayor was concerned about the project, the time to object would have been before all the negotiations and planning took place to draw up the agreement that was passed by the board.

The veto statement
In her veto statement, Kovarick said, “This one-sided debate has sounded like it was about the memorial, but it was never about the memorial. If Kirk had been truthful in his e-mails, on the radio, in the paper and with his supporters, he would have stressed that fact, but he conveniently left that out.”
In her statement, the mayor goes on to say “The dots have never been connected. There was never a workable, feasible plan for completion and this whole project is unsustainable and creating a maintenance and expense burden for the village.
“A good idea needs more than passion and good will to come to fruition. It needs professionals with the right expertise to execute and complete the idea. The people who have good ideas are rarely the same people who are able to execute against those ideas. Kirk Morris has let his mouth overload his capabilities. This is about gross incompetence since the beginning of this proposal in 2005.”
“I don’t think they have a basis in making that statement. Gross incompetence in what way?” said Peter Karlovics, an attorney who is on the HOF board. “Have we missed some type of schedule? Have we failed to install an item on the memorial properly? Are there any problems with the items currently installed on the site? The answer is no.”
Karlovics has been involved in several other memorial projects, including being committee chairman of the Warren Township War Memorial that presently stands in front of the Gurnee Police Station. He is not, however, representing the HOF Foundation in their lawsuit. Karlovics said that there was never a schedule for completion of the project to begin with, and that it is quite normal for memorial projects such as this one to take 10 to 15 years to complete when they’re privately funded. This project is only in its fifth year.
Karlovics also said he doesn’t believe it is lawful for a mayor to cancel building permits.
Kovarick’s veto statement went on to say, “This project has been a failure from the minute the resolution was passed. There isn’t one specific example of past performance over the past 5 years that would give you any indication of future success.
“This isn’t about the memorial. My discussion with Kirk Morris was to let him know that the project had been mismanaged, his foundation did not have the wherewithal or expertise to complete a project this complex but that they still have the opportunity to carry out their plan in the future once they raise sufficient funds to do so, but in the meantime, the area is owned by the Village and is under the Village’s jurisdiction and we will take care of it while still paying proper respect to the young men who gave their life in service to this country.”
Kovarik’s statement goes on to allege that before the village engages such projects, “we would expect due diligence to be performed. …There has been no due diligence on this foundation.” She goes on to accuse Morris of “misrepresenting the facts,” “blaming the village for foundation mistakes,” “smearing the reputation of the staff,” “misleading the board and the public,” and refusing to follow staff instructions.
“Where are the facts?” Karlovics said. “Forget about gross mismanagement. Where’s just plain mismanagement. Did we miss a schedule? Are we behind schedule? …Not only is there no gross mismanagement, there’s no mismanagement at all. It’s just a very difficult project, but this project has been tracking as it should. So that’s more political cover than it is truth,” he said.
While Kovarik’s veto statement makes many accusations, it fails to provide specifics. And when Kovarik was contacted by The Labor News, she stated she was unable to comment due to the fact that the matter was now in the hands of the court.
“In my capacity as mayor, I must defend the Village’s position, and since there’s a lawsuit, I can’t make any comments,” Kovarik said.
“There’s problems with the soil and the land itself,” Kovarik said. “It’s in a floodway. We demolished a building that was there [the old police station] and at the time we thought it was going to be open space, so the demolition wasn’t completed the way it would be if we were going to rebuild on the land.” Kovarik said there are pieces of the old building and foundation underground, as well as old equipment buried at the site. “There’s grave concerns about the site,” she said.

The politics
Kovarik’s critics accuse her of playing politics with the project, but she denies the charge.
“This is not a political decision,” Kovarik said. “As mayor or any elected official, anytime you have public land involved, there’s a process that any governing entity would go through to make sure that anything that is going to be built on government land or built for a government entity, in this case, a very nice public project to honor war veterans, there’s usually a due diligence to make sure that the contractor … has the capability and the wherewithal and the ability to complete the project, and over the years we’ve become concerned with all those types of things. But now it will be solved by the courts. They’ve filed a lawsuit, so it will be left up to the courts to decide.”
“We are obligated to make sure that whoever we do business with is capable of completing the project, and there’s a lot of questions about the project being completed by this entity,” Kovarik said.
But Morris disagrees. “Quite bluntly, I think the mayor thought I’d be another sheep on the council, and just follow along with what she wanted to do, but all she had to do is look a little further to find that the last thing I am is a sheep,” Morris said. “I have no problems speaking my mind and doing my own research and my own investigations and figuring out what I think the right course of actions is, and then acting on that. She and I have disagreed on a significant number of things.”
One of the specific items Morris pointed to was the red-light cameras that are in Gurnee. “I think they are bad for business and bad for the village,” Morris said.
Morris also pointed to the fact that she has raised a number of fees and taxes in the village, which he disagrees with. “When we face declining revenues, she looks to ways of raising revenues rather than cutting costs, so her and I have butted heads a number of times on that one.”
Morris says he has disagreed with her in the selling of public property to private entities, and to the fact that raises have been given to certain village staff and officials during a time of declining revenue when he feels there should have been wage freezes. He also says that the village uses outside consultants far too much when the village often has people on staff that are qualified to do the same work. “We have good people in our village hall. Let’s use them,” he said.
Kovarik said she still wants to see the memorial built. “I support the original resolution that dedicated that open space to the Heroes of Freedom Memorial Park to honor Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans, but there are plenty of solutions. None of those solutions will be on the table now. It will be decided by the courts.”
“There have been plenty of opportunities for this to be settled without a lawsuit, but they have decided to file a lawsuit, so we will wait for the courts to decide,” she said. “ It’s a very unfortunate situation because it didn’t have to turn out this way.”
“It’s an emotional issue, and unfortunately Mr. Morris lost a son, so we absolutely just grieve for him, but I don’t know that it’s easy to sort the emotions in the loss of a young man from the business of completing a project.”
Karlovics said that Kovarik stated the flagpoles were improperly installed. “She said they were improperly bolted into the cement, but if you go to the site, there are no bolts on the flagpoles. They’re sunk five feet into reinforced concrete. So she had to back away from that. She didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she said that removal of brush constituted a violation of the storm-water management permit, …but we produced evidence that shows that’s actually a requirement of the permit. So she’s throwing stuff out there, just like throwing mud against the wall, hoping that something will stick.”
Kovarik also alleged that there would be large costs to the village as a result of this project. “That’s another allegation that baffles me,” Karlovics said. “Costs of what? The project is being built by a private foundation, so there’s no issue there.”
Karlovics concedes there is a small maintenance cost to the village, but points out that the village is presently paying to maintain the area as green space, so he doesn’t really see how there would be much of an increase in cost to the village. There would be an electrical bill to light the flagpoles, but a number of veterans organizations have stepped up and said they would pay that bill, if needed.
Another of Kovariks charges was that the foundation wouldn’t be able to raise the money to complete the memorial. “We’re a charity,” Karlovics said. “When we built the Warren Township memorial, we didn’t have the money for that either. But we raised it—we built it.”
So far, the foundation has raised over $200,000 in donations and in kind donations from contractors. The next project for the foundation was to begin fundraising for the $300,000 needed to erect the statue. Morris said the project has attracted the attention of a number of national organizations, so he didn’t anticipate too many problems in raising the funds.
Kovarik also cited the costs of installing walkways and benches, but Karlovics said those were items that village staff put into the agreement. “We at the foundation thought ‘Oh, how nice, she’s kind of making up for damage she’d done to the foundation with all the controversy.’ We thought it was a nice thing she was doing. We didn’t know it was going to be used against us. We never asked for that money, and we don’t want it.”
“We believe she set it up so she would have something to veto later. We believe that this was a game all along; that she was never negotiating in good faith to begin with.” Karlovics said that if the walkways and benches were a problem, that the foundation would agree “in a heartbeat” to the exact same agreement that was passed by the board with those provisions removed.
“I was not expecting to spend one taxpayer dime, and she threw in a taxpayer expense,” Morris said
Kovarik also claimed that the site had not undergone the proper review process by village building officials, and that all it had undergone was the storm-water management review process.
“She was horribly embarrassed by that misstatement because we produced a building permit issued by the village” Karlovics said. “The storm-water management process also included the village engineer, so the village has known all along, and the village can’t deny that they’ve been involved in this process all along.”
Morris said that Kovarick stated publicly that the project was an “ill-conceived, poorly designed memorial. Really? The designer on this was the same architect who designed our own police station and four other memorials in the county. She had to publicly apologize to him. There’s not one aspect of this project that has not been conducted by a professional in this industry, from site engineers to soil engineers to civil engineers to structural engineers to contractors to excavators. There hasn’t been anything on that site that hasn’t been done by a professional other than the plants that were planted in the garden by an Eagle Scout.”
Karlovics said that there were no problems with the project when it was approved back in 2005, and Kovarik, who was on the village board at the time, voted to approve the project.
Karlovics said that a great deal of engineering had to be done on the site before it was approved for a storm-water management permit, as the site does lie in a floodplain. “The only change was that Kirk Morris got elected to the village board, and didn’t agree with [Kovarik] on a few political issues,” Karlovics said. “So this is her way of getting back at him.”
“Before Kirk got involved with the politics, things went a lot better. Before, this was just on a handshake agreement,” Karlovics said. “He thought everyone would act in good faith, and that clearly didn’t happen. …It’s just a lot of games with this thing, and we just wish the games would end,” Karlovics said. “I think overall, if we could get the politics out of this, it could be built on schedule and completed within the ten-year period.”
The foundation has run into problems at the site due to the fact that the site lies in a floodplain. The soil doesn’t have sufficient load-bearing capabilities in some places, so some soil remediation work has been done. In order to install a few of the flagpoles, crews had to dig down 15 feet to install a proper foundation for the flagpole. The foundation was planning to do some more underground stabilization work and install a V-shaped retaining wall last fall, but that work was put on hold when Kovarik put the project on hold.
“She derailed us pretty badly because the contractors[scheduled to do the work in the fall] all fled,” Karlovics said. But we have new contractors now who are willing to step up. We’ve have to go with totally new contractors now because the other ones are too afraid to come near the project.”
Karlovics doesn’t understand why the village is not doing more to work with the foundation. “Why all the criticism?” he said. “Why not the recognition that there’s a valiant effort to develop a flood plain and a collapsed police station into something beautiful Why not a thank you? That’s what leaves many of us baffled.”
“You can throw up some trees and put up a little park and call it a memorial, but it’s really not,” Karlovics said.
Marty Smith III, who is the Public Relations Officer of the Marine Corps League of Lake County, said that they originally began to support the HOF memorial project because they had brought The Morris and Maher family into the Marine Corps family after their tragic loss and simply wanted to see the memorial built for their sakes. While not officially a part of the foundation, “We just wanted to see the thing built,” Smith said.
Smith doesn’t understand why the village is trying to take the project away from the HOF foundation. “Why would the mayor do that to six gold-star families, six families in the town of Gurnee who have lost their loved ones, and that’s what she did. That’s why we in the League will always be against her for that,” Smith said.

A 12-inch model of the memorial.
photo by Wayne Brzycki

New board
To get the project moving again, the HOF foundation will be appointing a new board that will be comprised entirely of Operation Enduring Freedom veterans and OEF gold-star families. “So only people who have sacrificed in this conflict will be allowed to serve on this board,” Karlovics said. Morris will be resigning from the board.
Colonel Curt Ames, an Operation Enduring Freedom veteran, will be the new chairman of the HOF board. He is the former commanding officer of Marine Air Control Group 48 at the Great Lakes Naval Base. He was the Casualty Call Officer for the Chicago area, and just retired from service at the Pentagon. The CaCO is the officer who visits families to inform them of the loss of their son or daughter.
The board will also include Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Yantis, a former public relations officer in the Army, became director of the Pritzger Military Library after retiring, and is also director of the Korean War Museum in Chicago, and Lieutenant General Randy Rigby, among others.
Karlovics said, “This controversy has side-tracked the foundation horribly. It’s done a lot of damage, and I’m very grateful for all the veterans and gold-star families that have stepped up to support the project.” Karlovics said that Morris would be taking more of a back seat on the project because he believes that “personalities have overtaken patriotism. He believes he needs to step back from this and see if the mayor will have the same attitude towards a Marine Corps colonel just retired from the Pentagon.”
The memorial message
“We’ve lost our focus here, and this controversy has blurred the true purpose of this effort, which is to remember and thank the people who served in this war, and to let them know that, regardless of people’s opinions of this war, I think the overwhelming majority of Americans can appreciate the troops, and that’s the message that’s the most important,” Karlovics said. “And I would hope the mayor would join us in that statement. …It’s about trying to get people to remember. …It’s not about some abstract concept in history. These are real breathing, living people who had mothers and fathers and wives and sweethearts. We just want to bring this thing home for people. It’s not being built for now; it’s being built for 50 years from now.”
“This memorial has a very specific scope, and is designed to have a regional scope,” Karlovics said. He said it is intended to be much like the Vietnam War memorial is, “a place for healing.”
“This is a regional memorial,” Morris said. “It’s not just a piece of marble designed to honor my son. This is for all those who honorably served. I just happen to be the one who was asked by the village to champion this and pull it together. …. “My son was equal to all others who served, including those who came home.”
“We’ve got beams from the World Trade Center and bricks and masonry destined for this project,” Morris said. “This is more than a piece of marble, it’s going to tell the story of why we’re in this engagement, and what we’re engaged in, and that’s this whole war on terror.”
“These men and women did what their country asked, and some of them lost their lives, and this generation will be impacted forever,” Morris said. “ …We’re not trying to tell the political story; we’re trying to tell the soldier’s story. …That’s why we don’t want politics involved. Politics is what made this war messy and it’s what’s made this memorial messy,” Morris said.
“I was approached by the village to build this memorial,” Morris said. “They approached me. I didn’t approach them.”
Morris said that originally he had just planned to do a memorial paintball field on some property he owned in town where his son and some of the others who joined the service from his son’s graduating class used to play paintball. His plans were to put a few boardwalks in and make some other improvements and just leave it as both a nature preserve and as a place where kids could come and play paintball. “That’s all I was planning on doing.”
“My boy was the oldest of six children. Everybody looked up to him. He was a heck of a good athlete who had plenty of opportunities to go on to college with scholarships, but he chose to serve his country first. He came to me and said, ‘Dad, I’m not certain college is what I want to do right now. My country needs me right now. We’re at war,’” Morris said. He said his son told him he was in the best physical shape he could be in, and wanted to be the part of “the best of the best,” so he joined the Marines.
“The battle I fight is nothing compared to what those kids fought,” Morris said. “ …If they can do what they did, I can do this.”