About 50 residents filled Shorewood Hills' basement meeting room and dozens more joined online to watch the quasi-judicial proceeding to remove village president John Imes, but the sound system in the room only worked at times. Trustees fumbled to swap out their microphones, and consistently forgot to speak into them, prompting some in the room to interject with reminders to “speak up!” Those watching routinely stage-whispered commentary. “It doesn’t make any difference. Nothing is working,” someone muttered in response to one request to speak into the microphone.

“It’s a little bit of a circus,” resident Craig Weinhold told Isthmus with a smile, in the parking lot outside. He’d been watching online and biked down to village hall partway through. In the meeting room, some shook their heads, chortled, or clutched at their foreheads throughout the twists and turns.

By the end of five and a half hours of testimony, evidence and arguments, the Shorewood Hills Board of Trustees voted 4–3 on May 12 to remove John Imes from elected office, using a Wisconsin statute that allows village boards to remove elected officials in extreme circumstances. Today, the village has no president. Under state law, one can be appointed by the remaining board, or through a special election.

The decision is “obviously disappointing,” Imes told Isthmus the day after the vote. “But it’s not surprising.” He says he still has to “digest everything that happened,” but is weighing his option to appeal.

The ordeal follows months of strife in the village over a nixed proposal to buy a building for a new village hall, contentious development plans on Sweetbriar Road, and disputes over public records.

In the last year, Imes has twice faced a direct ask to resign by his colleagues on the board: once in November, and again in February; a January meeting also clarified “prescribed duties and privileges of the president.” Imes rejected all calls for him to resign, saying that the claims leveled against him are “false, damaging, and deeply hurtful.” The real issue before the village, he said, “is the tone and mistrust that have taken hold.”

The village is also facing a substantial turnover of staff. A longtime administrative services coordinator retired in September, and since October six more staffers have resigned, including one in every month of 2026, according to resignation letters obtained by Isthmus.

The letters tell a consistent story. One former administrative assistant urged trustees in October to “trust your staff,” “respect staff time,” and “be civil.” She noted that staff give up time on the weekend and one had been asked to work during a vacation. “Burnout is a real issue for those remaining. Many of you have been supportive of staff, but others don’t seem to understand the time and legal constraints we are up against.”

A clerk/deputy treasurer who resigned in January said that she “could not see a path forward under the current conditions,” citing a workload that demanded late nights and weekends beyond her salaried hours. She also referenced a “hostile” environment, including a trustee who “used her position to bully and intimidate the administration office, while unrealistic demands from residents escalated into threatening and undermining emails and comments.”

A February resignation letter from a deputy clerk/treasurer pointed to ongoing circumstances as creating “an unsafe and hostile work environment,” and “an atmosphere that feels intimidating and undermining of my professional role.” The most recent staffer who submitted his resignation in May cited regular unpaid overtime and a village that is "under-resourced to meet the needs and desires of its residents."

“Once again, we are at a critical point where we cannot stabilize our operations,” Village Administrator Brian Mooney wrote in a May 5 email to trustees, when sharing the latest resignation news. “The Village will soon be without two critical positions in our Administrative team, and [fulfilling] basic core services will be difficult for the foreseeable future.”

Imes was re-elected in April 2025, but his win, as is often the case in village politics, was decided by less than two dozen votes. His challenger, Rocky Van Asten, ran for trustee this spring and won. Also elected this spring was trustee Brian Utschig, one of two people who filed a complaint on April 28 to remove Imes.

In the complaint, Utschig and Peter Hans, a former village trustee and president, accused Imes of misrepresenting and concealing information about the multi-use Lodgic Building while he promoted its purchase to serve as the new village hall. They have also accused Imes of failing to disclose conflicts of interest tied to his leadership of the Wisconsin Environmental Initiative, and for hiding records by doing village business through personal email.

These reasons, they said, warranted use of a state statute allowing a village board to remove officials for “continued physical inability to perform the duties of office” or for “gross neglect.” The statute, which dates to 1947, does not provide additional guidance for what behavior amounts to “gross neglect,” leaving trustees to interpret the statute themselves.

At the May 12 hearing, which included arguments, the presentation of evidence, and cross-examination, Imes and his attorney Erin Deeley denied each charge listed in the complaint. They argued a profit-and-loss statement on the Lodgic purchase was accessible to village staff (Imes selectively forwarded it to only two trustees to avoid open meetings violations), an outside appraisal drove the financial analysis and was complicated by the building’s funding mechanism, and that Imes ultimately voted against continuing with the Lodgic deal.

Instead of the alleged “conflicts of interest,” Imes and Deeley acknowledged “overlapping relationships” with Stone House Development, Boardman & Clark, and Madison Gas and Electric due to Imes’ role as head of WEI and his unpaid role as village president. They denied that it rose to the level of “misconduct in public office,” arguing that Imes had never used his position to gain a “dishonest advantage.”

Imes did say that it’s “not good practice” to use personal email for public business.

Imes asked both Utschig and Van Asten to recuse themselves from the vote but both refused to do so. “I am not so biased that I cannot change my opinion,” said Utschig, noting that he could stay impartial while bringing the complaint and presenting evidence in the hearing. He and Van Asten ultimately voted to remove Imes.

Imes argued that if he were to be removed, it should be done through a recall process. “If the public is unhappy with an elected official, the ballot box is where the public is heard, whether through a general election or recall. That principle is fundamental, regardless of political disagreements,” Imes said before the vote.

Two trustees voted with Imes against removal. “I really urge the board to go slowly now, because this is consequential, not only for John, but also for the village” said Mark Lederer, adding that voters who had cast ballots for Imes had not been given a say in his removal. “If that doesn’t make you a little bit uncomfortable, I'm not sure that you're a small-d democrat.”

Others seemed to waver, including Van Asten, who insulted Imes at the same time he called for abandoning the effort to remove him. “This has got to be the most incompetent person I would have sat next to,” said Van Asten. “But in this type of proceeding, I don't think we should go any further.”

A motion to adjourn failed, and Van Asten ultimately cast the deciding vote to remove Imes. Just before, Van Asten had clasped Imes’s hand. “I tried, John,” he said. “I tried. I tried.”

On May 14, two days after Imes’ ouster, village administrator Brian Mooney spoke frankly to the village’s personnel committee about Shorewood’s staffing crisis.

He said he and Taylor Wall, the clerk and deputy treasurer, had worked 18 hours on May 12, the day of the special hearing, and were already behind in preparing for next week’s board meeting. They would also likely end up working on Saturday.

“We’re gorged to the throat every day over here,” Wall said.

Mooney said burnout has been exacerbated by key departures in the last year, which have cost the village decades of institutional knowledge. Things are being “reinvented as we go,” he added, and staff losses amid a growing backlog has meant they’ve become “somewhat lost at sea.” In the last month, one new administrative assistant has come on board, and another temporary hire has been moved into a full-time role.

“I don’t have a lot of cards to play right now,” said Mooney. The village is at its levy limit, and last year, net new construction brought in a “whopping” extra $9,000. “We have chosen as a community at this moment to not go forward with a referendum, this year, or possibly next year,” he said, though early closures of tax increment financing districts could bring some revenue relief.

“Levy limits in Wisconsin have tied the hands of local governments,” Mooney tells Isthmus in an interview on May 15, “and the inflationary environment we are experiencing makes solving budget issues that much more difficult.”

Some fixes are in the works: administrative staff may be soon relieved of taking notes during evening committee meetings, the village is getting some help from a professional staffing firm, and Mooney is recruiting a new finance director. Next week, when the village board sorts out the aftermath of Imes’ removal, it will also consider a recommendation to hire two part-time limited term employees to join the administrative staff.