State police are investigating the ”disappearance” of $277,000 worth of furniture, medical equipment and other state property that examiners for the state auditor general`s office could not locate after the Manteno Mental Health Center was closed late last year.
The investigation was sought by Auditor Gen. Robert Cronson after his staff took an inventory and was unable to locate 976 pieces of state property. The volume of the missing items stunned the auditors and prompted Cronson to ask for a criminal investigation into the missing property, which supposedly had been stored in a dozen buildings on the sprawling 400-acre site in Kankakee County, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago.
An official of the state Department of Central Management Services contended Tuesday that the items might have been lost through poor record keeping. But Cronson said in a legislative report that the center`s buildings and equipment ”were not adequately safeguarded” when the center closed last Dec. 31 after 58 years of operation.
The report indicates that thieves might have had three weeks to help themselves to the equipment and furniture because an inventory was not taken until mid-January. The last previous inventory was in June, 1984.
A pattern of earlier thefts also was noted in the report.
In the three months before the closing, four thefts of items valued at a total of $1,800 were reported to local police officials.
Employees of three state departments–Central Management Services, Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities and Veterans Affairs–had keys to the buildings where the equipment was stored between January and May, the report said.
Cronson also declared that Manteno officials violated state regulations by failing to keep track of property items costing between $50 and $100.
”We assume that most of the property was either lost or transferred to other facilities and it`s not really missing,” said Pat Foley, a spokesman for the Department of Central Management Services.
Foley said his agency will begin a paperwork review Wednesday in an effort to reconcile the missing property with state documents.
Robert Fletcher, a spokesman for the state police, said the inquiry will determine whether state regulations may have been ignored or circumvented.
In attempting to close the books on Manteno, the auditors also found that the state had leased–for $1 a year–60 acres of land to the village of Manteno for the expansion of a municipal golf course. But the village then turned around and sublet the land to a farmer for a profit of $7,379 a year.
”The original lease states the land can only be used for recreational purposes and cannot be sublet (without state permission),” the auditors noted. The village was granted the 33-year lease in 1972.
Michael E. Tristano, director of central management services, told Cronson that a new lease will be negotiated with the village.
