26-04-2025
Ethics board complaint against Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido dismissed
It's been languishing for about a year, and now it's gone.
The Macomb County Ethics Board dismissed a complaint against Prosecutor Peter Lucido that lingered for nearly a year and resulted in a lawsuit against the ethics board and the county's top attorney.
The complaint alleged Lucido used county property, buildings and offices to create a photo of himself for political campaign purposes.
"Pete is elated that they're no longer attacking him. ... He's always said he's done nothing wrong," Lucido's attorney, Todd Perkins, told the Free Press on April 25. "It should have been dismissed a long time ago. We're happy to have this."
Mark Brewer, the former Michigan Democratic Party chairman who filed two complaints against Lucido, a Republican, with the ethics board last year, said: "This is outrageous on several fronts." Brewer said he had no notice about the ethics board's meeting and no notice to make any additional arguments.
"He's not gonna be held accountable for violating the ethics ordinance," Brewer said of Lucido, adding: "They just let him get away with it."
The other complaint against Lucido was dismissed by the ethics board in June.
The ethics board dismissed the remaining complaint against Lucido on April 15. It also dismissed complaints filed in March against other countywide elected officials, including Executive Mark Hackel and others who work in his office, Sheriff Anthony Wickersham and Don Brown, former chairman of the Board of Commissioners, County Corporation Counsel John Schapka said.
Warren resident Paul Kardasz, who briefly served under county Clerk Karen Spranger before she was ousted in 2018, filed a handful of the complaints, most alleging Hackel and some in his office failed to disclose financial relationships with Hackel's campaign committee.
Christopher Stump, who works in Perkins' law firm, filed complaints alleging Hackel, Wickersham and Brown used county resources, including, in some cases, "Make Macomb Your Home" photographs, on their campaign websites and/or campaign social media.
Schapka said the majority of the complaints, including the one against Lucido, were dismissed for "failure of subject matter jurisdiction." Another was dismissed, he said, because of "failure of personal jurisdiction" as the person is not a county employee.
Perkins wasn't present for the ethics board's decision this month, but said he believes "as soon as these other individuals were put in the crosshairs of ethics complaints, they dismissed Pete's."
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A hearing on the ethics board complaint against Lucido was to be held in July 2024, but Lucido sued the board and Schapka weeks ahead of it in circuit court, and the hearing was put on hold.
Schapka said the claims against the ethics board in the lawsuit were dismissed, and the board could proceed on the complaint it had against Lucido. The lawsuit is pending, with two claims remaining against Schapka.
Schapka said it is unusual for this many ethics board complaints to be filed at one time against elected officials or county employees. Most complaints get dismissed immediately as they are either "blatantly bizarre" or not about county workers. There is one pending ethics board complaint against Schapka, which was filed by Perkins.
"I don't like the ethics board or the ethics ordinance being used as a tool for political revenge," Schapka said. "That is not what they exist for, and they're never meant to be used in that fashion."
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Perkins said that he believes the ethics board "has been weaponized by politicos and people in power to go after other people," that it should be dismantled and be within the embrace and control of the Board of Commissioners. Currently, the five ethics board members are nominated by the executive and subject to approval by the Board of Commissioners.
In October, it was reported that Lucido may have violated the state's Campaign Finance Act when a newsletter from his public email address included a link to his campaign website after Brewer filed a separate complaint with the state.
In a March 5 letter, the Department of State determined the complaint was filed nearly two years after the unintentional violation and that Lucido "took affirmative action by correcting the violation before the complaint was filed, the Department concludes that a formal warning is a sufficient resolution to the complaint and considers the matter concluded."
Contact Christina Hall: chall@ Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @challreporter.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Macomb County Ethics Board dismisses complaint against Peter Lucido
