County Attorney addresses termination, resignations, and investigations within PHHS

Months after several employees were listed as “out of office” within Cook County Public Health and Human Services, the Board of Commissioners will accept three resignations and one termination within the department at their upcoming Aug. 12 meeting.

The staffing items are all part of the consent agenda for the upcoming meeting, and include the resignations of Alison McIntyre from her role as PHHS director, John Spieker from his role as Behavioral Health Services and Clinical Manager, and Merrisa Chapman from her role as Adult and Home and Community Based Services Supervisor. Also in the consent agenda is the termination of Dana Logan from her role as Adult Mental Health Case Manager.

While County Attorney Jeanne Peterson was not able to comment on the specifics of each former employee’s departure from the county, she did tell WTIP that the staffing changes come on the heels of a series of complaints filed against supervisors within the department in April and June, and subsequent investigations into those complaints.

“We are addressing the concerns that were raised, and yes, there were some resignations during the pendency of those investigations,” she said.

Peterson said the investigations began shortly after the complaints were made, though she was not able to provide more information about the individual complaints, or what the investigations uncovered at this time. She said the investigations’ findings are expected to become public, though she could not give a specific timeline for when the documents from each investigation might become public record.

The county opted to conduct the investigations using an outside organization, which Peterson said she wasn’t able to name until documents related to the investigation are released.

She explained the choice to pursue an external investigation, saying, “I think any time that you’re addressing complaints against a supervisor, or people who have authority within the department, people who are well respected within the county, and who have a long time service within the county, as well as the fact that they’re dealing with very sensitive information, it just makes sense to have a neutral third party come in.”

While the investigations were ongoing, Peterson said the county opted not to speak about them publicly for a few reasons. First, she said they wanted to minimize potential panic around disruption of services or concern from clients about accessing PHHS resources. The second reason she identified was the nature of the information that was part of the investigations.

“We just had a lot of privacy and confidentiality concerns about the subjects of the investigation, so therefore we had to keep things quiet,” she said.

Peterson mentioned that when documents related to the investigations become public, they will need to be heavily redacted to remove any personal data protected by state or federal law related to the services provided by PHHS.

“We would want people to understand for sure that any clients of Public Health and Human Services, people who have contact with Public Health and Human Services, people who are providers for Health and Human Services, that their information will remain protected through this process,” she said.

Moving forward, Fiscal Supervisor Plamen Dimitrov has been named interim director for PHHS, and Peterson said the department is working to ensure that client services are not interrupted. While Dimitrov was only recently officially appointed as interim director, he provided the director’s report during the June and July PHHS Board meetings.

With four key roles suddenly open, questions have arisen about what the future structure of the department might look like.

When asked about the potential of restructuring, Peterson said, “I think everything’s on the table right now. We have a new County Administrator, Kristen Trebil-Halbersma, and we have Interim Director Plamen Dimitrov in place right now, so we’re really at ground zero for rebuilding. And I think we need to take a careful look at the entire department and be really careful about how we restructure.”

County Attorney Jeanne Peterson spoke with WTIP’s Kirsten Wisniewski about the staffing changes at PHHS and the investigations that led to them. Audio of that interview is below.

Kirsten Wisniewski August 8, 2025