Karen Spranger
OK, Freep, you outsourced your copy editing to another state, but this headline -- especially when accompanied by a photo of the subject in her aviator shades -- is gonna make us click:
Macomb County clerk suggested fecal-eating worms for office toilets
Macomb County's ousted clerk, Karen Spranger, once suggested installing toilets over holes in the floor containing fecal eating worms as a way to add more bathrooms to a county building without having to run additional plumbing.
That was among the odd, and sometimes outright bizarre, revelations that came out in depositions taken in a federal whistleblower lawsuit filed against Spranger by two of her former top deputies, who she fired within months of appointing them.
A whistleblower report? Do tell! (Please imagine one of those popcorn-eating GIFs here until we get this design worked out and we can insert one for real.)
Former Macomb County Clerk Karen Spranger
Spranger presided over the Macomb clerk's office less than two years after her surprise election in 2016. A judge removed her in March after ruling she had lied on her filing documents and was not a legal resident of the county. A dliapidated house in Warren, her ostensible legal residence, had no running water and had been invaded by, among other things, a colony of raccoons.
During her 15-month tenure, Spranger is said to have turned what had been a smooth-running office into a chaotic one, firing staff and, apparently, suggesting novel ideas for plumbing projects. The position paid roughly $106,000. No word on where Spranger is today, and the race to elect a replacement has hardly restored voters' trust in the process, according to Chad Selweski, writing in Deadline Detroit last month:
After the extraordinarily high-profile demise of Spranger, a Republican who somehow beat two other candidates in the 2106 GOP primary elections, what we now have is almost a rematch -- Democrat Fred Miller, who lost to Spranger in 2016, facing another incomprehensible Republican nominee, Lisa Sinclair, who has a shaky background.
Sinclair was arrested in 2003 for drunken driving when she crashed her vehicle into a car stopped at a red light. In 2011, she was arrested in Marysville after a drunken, profanity-laced tirade aimed at police while at a gas station. Eight lesser traffic-related incidents, including driving with expired plates and illegally parking in a handicapped space, were cited from 1999-2017.
Don't ever change, Macomb.
