Council member clarifies her role in business with town
Screen capture from YouTube
Gilbert Town Council Member Yung Koprowski speaks at a recent council meeting. A resident filed two ethics complaints against Koprowski for her company's business dealings with the town, though Koprowski clarified her role in the two projects.
Two more ethics complaints were filed July 13 against a Gilbert Town Council member, bringing to four such complaints lodged against three different members.
Maricopa County island resident Terri Naddy filed two complaints against Council Member Yung Koprowski, charging the firm Koprowski owns, Y2K Engineering, profited from doing business with the town, creating a conflict of interest. Naddy’s complaints covered two separate instances of the company providing services to the town.
Koprowski, a civil engineer, told the Gilbert Independent that both instances were cleared after consulting with the town attorney and other elected officials in a similar position as Koprowski, who said she created a firewall between her and business involving the town after her appointment to council in April 2020.
Previously, Gilbert resident Maureen Hoppe filed a complaint, twice amended, against council members Jim Torgeson and Bobbi Buchli for spreading misinformation and failing to correct it when she brought it to their attention. Her complaint alleges that their failure to do so led to harassment of her and retaliation against her in her position as a Legislative District 14 Republican Party precinct committee member.
Mayor Brigette Peterson later filed a complaint against Torgeson based on a voicemail recording that Peterson alleged impugned her character. Hoppe had included the voicemail in her complaint as evidence, and the complaint was distributed to all council members.
The town has referred Hoppe’s complaint, filed July 10, to outside counsel for independent investigation. The other three complaints, filed July 13, await review from Town Attorney Christopher Payne, who has been on vacation, but are likely also to be referred to outside counsel because they were made against council members — technically Payne’s bosses.
Naddy has frequently spoken at council meetings against the town’s Ocotillo Road widening project, which would take a portion of her front yard.
In her first complaint, Naddy cites Koprowski submitting a bid to provide professional architectural or engineering services for the town on a capital improvement project to install an adaptive signal timing system and associated equipment at nine intersections in the San Tan Village Mall area.
Y2K was contracted into an agreement on this project on Nov. 2, 2020, for $66,570 in labor and expenses. Of that, $5,300 was for subdesigner Landcor.
In the second complaint, Naddy cites Koprowski for submitting a proposal to provide professional services for the town for the firm's “Power BI Data Connection,” a motor vehicle crash dashboard, on Sept. 15, 2022. This proposal was to supplement an already existing dashboard created by Y2K in 2020, Naddy wrote. Payment terms follow their "existing on call” terms, not to exceed $10,000.
Koprowski said that after her appointment to council and the creation of the firewall in her company, she was not the signatory for any Gilbert projects.
She said a different project manager worked the first project.
“After that first project, we decided just to keep it really clean and not take any more new projects (from the town) except for where we were supporting and continuing our work with the broken system (on the second project),” Koprowski said. “And that was really as a pass-through to our sub-consultant that had the GIS expertise to help correct that system.”
Naddy emailed the town earlier questioning the projects, and Town Clerk Chaveli Herrera forwarded it to Koprowski, Town Manager Patrick Banger and Town Attorney Payne.
Koprowski emailed Naddy to explain what happened in the projects and attached her financial disclosure statement with the Arizona Secretary of State’s office and included a detailed revenue summary of Y2K Engineering's work with the town before and after her appointment.
Regarding the first project, Koprowski wrote: “While we have declined to design the same number of traffic signals that we used to, we agreed to undertake this project due to our specialized knowledge and experience in this area. It is worth noting that all negotiations and contracts related to this project were handled by other leadership within Y2K Engineering, ensuring that my involvement as a council member did not influence the process.”
On the second project, Koprowski wrote that the company was fixing data connections in the Power BI dashboard, which Y2K Engineering had developed prior to her appointment. An update to a police department system required a fix to the data connections.
“Given our previous involvement in developing the dashboard, we rectified the issue on a time and materials basis,” she wrote. “As with the traffic signal project, all negotiations and contracts pertaining to this project were handled independently by other leaders within Y2K Engineering, thereby ensuring an impartial and fair process.”
Koprowski further noted in the email that Y2K Engineering has a subconsultant role for roadway lighting design for the Vaughn Ventilator project in the Heritage District, a role that was established before her appointment, and that Y2K continues to meet its obligations on the project.
Naddy acknowledged in her complaint that Koprowski had emailed her to explain her position, but wrote Koprowski “contradicts herself in that email. I'll explain more in my three minutes of citizen communications during the next council meeting.”
That meeting is scheduled for Aug. 1.
Koprowski said she was transparent with Naddy in providing all the information she had, an act she said she was happy to do as the questions were important to Naddy.
“I don't know what else I would need to clarify or what she feels is contradictory,” she said.
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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