Every election has winners and losers, people who are happy and sad with however the votes fall.
So on Wednesday, when Greg Shepard called a WGLT reporter, we asked how he was doing.
“I could be better,” he said. “I was hoping a different mayor would be elected.”
He was talking about the Normal mayoral election, in which Chris Koos was re-elected to a sixth term. Shepard wanted challenger Kathleen Lorenz to win. She came up about 470 votes short. Fellow council member Chemberly Harris finished third.
Shepard played an unusual role in the race. Records show the businessman and his wife, Heather, made a $29,200 campaign contribution to the McLean County Republicans. A few weeks later, the Republicans gave $28,000 to Lorenz’s mayoral campaign – money that Lorenz said was from an unnamed donor who wanted to funnel it through a group like the GOP. A pass-through move like that circumvents campaign-finance laws which limit how much a single person can give and require everybody to disclose what they did.
A State Board of Elections official said one specific part of Illinois election code “could be problematic” in this case. It prohibits people from giving or receiving campaign contributions in the name of somebody else. Another campaign-finance expert said the State Board of Elections should require Lorenz to give the money back. No complaint had been filed with the State Board of Elections as of late Tuesday.
Lorenz has defended her campaign, arguing that “everything has been done with the highest level of integrity and transparency which is why people know about the donation!”
Shepard said he wasn’t ready to talk about the $29,200 contribution when he called WGLT on Wednesday. WGLT asked him why he’d route a Lorenz contribution through the local GOP.
“Oh for Chrissake, you think I'm gonna get into any of that?” Shepard said. He later hung up on the WGLT reporter as he was being asked if he’s concerned about potentially violating campaign-finance laws.
One quirk of this already quirky story is that Shepard is Koos’ cousin, meaning he was funding a campaign to vote out one of his own relatives. Shepard’s grandfather and Koos’ grandfather were brothers, Koos said.
Shepard said he didn’t know they were related until the WGLT story was published. He thanked WGLT for making him aware of that.
“I don’t know Chris all that well,” he said.
Lorenz told WGLT that she coordinated with her unnamed donor to route the money through the McLean County Republicans, which was at the donor’s request. Lorenz said the “ridiculous amount of money” was critical to paying for three weeks of advertising during the homestretch of the campaign. She said that advertising gave her a better chance to win against a favored incumbent.
Lorenz would not identify the donor, but she confirmed that the $28,000 she received from the McLean County Republicans last week came from him. Election filings strongly suggest it was Shepard.
Typically, an individual is capped at $7,300 in contributions to a candidate campaign committee like Lorenz’s, based on state contribution limits. However, individuals can give larger sums to political party committees like the McLean County Republicans, and there is no limit to how much political party committees can give to candidate campaign committees.
It’s still unclear why Shepard would want to support Lorenz’s campaign. Lorenz would only say that she and the donor “have a shared vision, that it (was) time for new leadership.”
In his contribution disclosures, Shepard listed his address as in Lakewood Ranch, Florida, although he's also lived in Bloomington. Shepard lists his occupation as self-employed or businessman in the insurance industry, records show. Shepard has made $1,000+ contributions to other Republican-aligned local candidates in recent years, including Bloomington mayor-elect and former state Rep. Dan Brady, Normal Town Council member Scott Preston, and former McLean County Board member Chuck Erickson, records show.
When Shepard called WGLT, we asked why he funneled the money through the local GOP. He did not answer directly. Shepard, a landowner, instead began talking about Bloomington-Normal families that have owned land in town for generations and want to see it developed into something. It was unclear if or how the two topics – the contribution and land development – were connected.
“Now that’s a story,” Shepard said. “The election involving donors, that’s not a story. That's gossip.”
