Baby squirrels may have been a reason for last year’s split between the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County and a charitable group that raises money to fund the rehabilitation of wild animals.
The Forest Preserve filed suit against the organization, the DuPage Wildlife Foundation, at its regular meeting, Oct. 20, more than a year after the foundation split from the county. The suit claims the DuPage Wildlife Foundation is holding on to charity money that should belong to the district’s Willowbrook Wildlife Center in Glen Ellyn.
Coco Luedi, president of the Downers Grove-based DuPage Wildlife Foundation, deferred questions about the lawsuit to her lawyers, but did not hold back from accusing the Willowbrook Wildlife Center of unnecessarily euthanizing baby animals.
“Even healthy, young squirrels, they would (euthanize a large number of them and) they would not tell people,” Luedi said. “They closed the back door, they didn’t like anybody going in. ... We’re going to bring this stuff out.”
The story begins in 1982, when an organization, Friends of the Furred and Feathered of DuPage County, was created. That group later changed its name to the Willowbrook Wildlife Foundation. Then in April 2008, with a new board of directors, the group changed its name a second time to the DuPage Wildlife Foundation.
According to Jim Knippen, an attorney for the Forest Preserve, the organization originally told the state of Illinois it would be a nonprofit corporation that existed exclusively to raise money for the Forest Preserve to support wildlife rehabilitation. Specifically, the foundation supported the Willowbrook Wildlife Center, which treats injured and orphaned animals native to northeastern Illinois.
However, Knippen said, when the organization changed its name to the DuPage Wildlife Foundation in 2008, it also changed its corporate purpose so the Forest Preserve was no longer the exclusive beneficiary of any money raised.
Knippen said what the organization did was legal, but it now must account for all the money it received prior to changing its corporate purpose.
“(People who donated money to the organization) understood that money was being donated for the specific purpose that was on record with the Secretary of State,” Knippen said.
The Forest Preserve now wants the court to stop the DuPage Wildlife Foundation from using money donated to it before April 8, 2008, for anything other than the nonprofit purposes it committed to in its filings with the Secretary of State.
The DuPage Wildlife Foundation split from the forest preserve in June 2008.
In past reports on the foundation’s split from the Forest Preserve, Luedi had accused the district of withholding the foundation’s records and information about the operations of the Willowbrook Wildlife Center.
Knippen said he does not know whether the Willowbrook Wildlife Center has euthanized baby squirrels.
“There are federal (and state) regulations that govern how you deal with wild animals,” Knippen said. “The district stringently follows the wildlife laws of the federal government and the state with regard to wildlife.”
Glen Ellyn, IL —
