By:  Diane Benjamin

Gerrard is the guy who filed the ethics complaint with the City of Bloomington against Nikita Richards.

This morning he left a comment on this site that neither the Pantagraph reporter or the WJBC reporter contacted him before doing stories.  He stated he is not behind the Bloomington Deserves Better Facebook page, contrary to the WJBC reporting.

Kevin wrote this email to the Pantagraph reporter (printed with permission)

Ms. Buddy,   (spelled wrong on purpose)

Some of your facts are incorrect in your article re: my filing of an Ethics Complaint Nikita Richards with the City of Bloomington.

First, no attempts were made to contact me for details of my complaint, and you contacted the individual who filed against Ms Michael. You wrote an article more slanted against Ms Michael than you did Ms Richards. It is obvious by these actions that you are a biased writer, but the public has already known that for quite some time.

I filed my own FOIA for the entire calendar month of June 2018. I received back the printouts from the city, and after going through more than 1,800 pages of printouts , it was ascertained that Ms Richards partook in non job related  and some campaign related activities while on city time. True, she shopped for the city. But both BLN News and I procured copies of all invoices for items she purchased during the periods we of time that we were checking. We cross checked invoiced purchases against websites visited. There were quite a few that didn’t have anything to do with the City, There are about a dozen other activities she was involved in. Cities 92.9 reported them,  and posted them along with all the documents relevant to my filing in their article as a link. They are journalists. Why don’t you, and the rest at The Pantagraph try and be like them and stop being hacks for the local Democratic Party? Your getting pretty close to being the Democratic Party’s Official Newspaper. I think we should start a movement to erect a statue of Lenin and place it in front of your front doors.

The BLN News is far more than a blog, it’s one of the few news sources that reports honestly and with tangible facts. Everything the Editor prints is based off of documents procured through FOIA or other legal means. Cities 92.9 News the same. Their reporters actually report and just don’t regurgitate  what some politician , some connected friend, or big wig in town told them. I’ve lived in a lot of cities, I’ve had many newspapers through out the United States as clients. Hands down, The Pantagraph is the most corrupt news outlet I’ve ever seen going back over 35 years. I don’t expect my complaint to get much traction due to the corruption in this city. The best thing that can happen is that Lee Enterprises either closes you done or cleans house.  By the way, I sent the complaint to the city. The City Manager made a unilateral decision to send it to the IL Ethics Commission. I only sent in the complaint on a State Form provided by the State Ethics Commission because I didn’t want the complaint thrown out for not following the right format like what almost happened when I filed a complaint against the Mayor before the BEC.

Kevin Gerrard