DOROTHY A.

BROWN COOK
Retired – Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County

December 17, 2020

TO: WGN NEWS 9
I recently viewed a promo indicating that WGN will be doing a story on
“Bumpy Transition” of the new Clerk of Court, Iris Martinez, and I was
appalled. Please know that no one reached out to me for my position
on the story, and it is about an office I held for 20 years and she has only
served in for 17 days.
Therefore, below is my statement.
“If Iris Martinez is having a bumpy transition, it is her own fault, because
she rebuffed my efforts to properly transition her, AND SHE OBVIOUSLY
DOES NOT HAVE A PLAN OR A CLUE ON HOW TO RUN THE OFFICE, SO
SHE IS SENDING UP SMOKE SCREENS AS A COVER-UP. She is a legislator
and not an administrator, and I will not be her scapegoat. She needs to
stop whining and start managing. (See the string of emails below, trying
to get her to transition).
• She rebuffed my attempts to properly transition with her, and
when we did meet over a 4-day period, including a tour, she and
her team were not attentive, and asked less than 10 questions.
• I had to tell her on November 17th, the first transition meeting
date, when her term started, she thought it started on December
7th, even though mine ended on November 30th. This showed
immediate ineptness.
• In the middle of a pandemic, during her first thru fourth days in
office, SHE FIRED ALMOST ALL OF THE MANAGEMENT TEAM THAT
 KNOW HOW TO RUN THE OPERATION, AND BROUGHT IN PEOPLE
WITH NO CLUE, AND SOME WITH QUESTIONABLE BACKGROUNDS.
This demonstrates poor judgment and a lack of understanding on
how to strategically transition an intricate and complex operation
as I did.
• Iris Martinez and her team are walking around like tyrants as
opposed to asking employees for clarifications. The boxes Iris
Martinez is pointing at in the promo are boxes for the Accounting
Department, which were approved to be placed very neatly in that
space by the Chicago Fire Department. The Accounting
Department does not have a file room to store boxes containing
data needed for audit and research, before forwarding to the
warehouse. She had them moved without asking the staff for
clarification.
• She and her team are showing disrespect to the American English
language and the English-speaking staff, by only communicating in
Spanish, when non-Spanish speaking staff are present. This is a
lack of transparency. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING.
• She promised transparency, but she is already hiding information
from the employees and the public concerning the positive COVID-
19 cases in the Clerk’s Office. On the COVID-19 announcement
memorandums and press releases, that I always sent to employees
and the press, she removed the cumulative number of employees
testing positive; and only provides the floor the employee testing
positive works on and not the specific department for the Daley
Center cases.
• According to an article in the Chicago Crusader, Iris Martinez’s
administration does not look like the racial make-up of Cook
County, but it looks like Puerto Rico. The Crusader article said,
over 80% of the management staff she fired, were Black, when
 Blacks voted for her by over 90% in the majority of the Black
wards. She has replaced most of the management staff, regardless
of their race, with mostly Puerto Ricans.

Time-line of my cajoling Iris Martinez to participate in the Transition

After Iris Martinez was elected on November 3rd, and she had not
reached out to me, to request some transition meetings, I contacted her
on Monday, November 9th, six days after her victory, to provide her with
some transition meeting dates and a tour date. She basically rebuffed
the meeting dates and the tour date, where she and her team could ask
questions and get clarifications; and requested only to obtain the
transition document. It was only after several days of my going and
back and forth with her, trying to help her understand the complexity of
the office, did she finally, on November 16th, only 14 day before the end
of my term, agree to some transition meetings.” (See the string of
emails below, between myself and Iris Martinez).