Marengo Has Its Own Code Court. Here's What to Know if a Citation Lands.

Since last summer, a code violation in Marengo does not necessarily go before a judge at the county courthouse in Woodstock. It can be decided at city hall, by a hearing officer the city hires.

If this is news to you, you are in good company. The council created the program, called administrative adjudication, by a unanimous vote on June 23, 2025. It was mentioned at a May council meeting, where the minutes describe it as "a local court," but there was no press release and no announcement aimed at residents. It has been running for about a year, and most residents we have talked to had no idea it exists.

This is not a Marengo invention, and it is not a scandal. Illinois law has let municipalities run their own hearing systems for decades, and towns all around us use them. But it changes what happens if a citation ever lands in your mailbox, so we read the whole ordinance, Chapter 45 of the city code, pulled the program's records, and worked through how it runs. Here is what we found.

What the Council Created

Chapter 45 sets up an in-house hearing system for ordinance violations. Instead of the city filing a case at the courthouse and everyone waiting on a circuit court date, the city issues a citation, sets a hearing at city hall, and a hearing officer decides the matter.

The hearing officer, called an administrative law judge, is not a judge in the county courthouse sense. The ordinance requires an attorney licensed in Illinois for at least three years, appointed by the city administrator with the council's advice and consent, who has completed a formal training program before hearing cases. The city has budgeted about $10,000 a year for adjudication, and pays its hearing officer $150 an hour. Actual payments have run under the budget: bill lists show roughly $2,000 in 2024, $3,200 in 2025, and $1,500 through mid-May of this year. Those figures cover the hearing officer only. The city's regular attorneys also bill time on adjudication matters, mostly not broken out in the bill lists, so the program's full cost is not knowable from public billing records.

Marengo's hearing officer is Woodstock attorney Mollie Dahlin. City bill lists show payments to her firm, M. Dahlin, P.C., for "court for city code violations," and her firm's website lists her as administrative law judge for Marengo, the City of McHenry, and five other local bodies. She spent more than a decade as a prosecutor and currently serves as village prosecutor for four other area towns. That kind of double duty is common in this corner of municipal law: the lawyer who judges code cases in one town often prosecutes the same kinds of cases a few towns over. When Marengo first went looking for a hearing officer in 2023, staff told the council only two attorneys in the area did this work at comparable rates.

What It Can and Cannot Decide

The program handles ordinance violations: property maintenance, tall grass, signs, nuisance complaints, and parking tickets (more on those below). The city also uses the same hearing officer for vehicle impound reviews, which run under a separate authorization the council approved in 2023.

Some important limits, set by state law and the ordinance itself. It cannot hear moving violations or anything that would go on your driving record. Speeding tickets still go to the courthouse in Woodstock. It cannot jail anyone. And fines are capped per violation: $750 for most offenses, $250 for parking.

The cap comes with a catch. It applies per violation, an unfixed problem can be cited again and again, and the ordinance lets the hearing officer enter a total order of up to $50,000 in a single case, plus the city's enforcement costs on top. In one McHenry County case that reached the appellate court in 2014, a property owner who ignored repeated tickets from another village ended up owing more than $45,000, with the village cleared to garnish wages to collect it.

How a Case Actually Works

It starts with a citation from police or code enforcement, served in person or by mail. If mail cannot reach the owner, the city can post the notice on the property instead, though not on a vacant lot or vacant building. A posted notice must go up at least 20 days before the hearing. In a non-emergency, you are entitled to at least 15 days after service to prepare if you ask for it.

The hearing itself is open to the public and recorded. You can bring photos, documents, and witnesses, cross-examine the city's witnesses, and bring a lawyer, though you do not need one. You can also ask the hearing officer to subpoena a witness or records.

Know that the procedure is looser than a courtroom, in ways that mostly favor the party bringing the case. The citation itself counts as prima facie evidence that the violation happened. Hearsay can come in, as long as it is the kind of information a reasonably prudent person would rely on. And the standard of proof is civil: more likely than not, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt.

For building code charges, the ordinance lists specific defenses: the problem was fixed by the hearing date, the occupants caused it despite the owner's reasonable attempts to prevent it, which can mean going as far as filing to evict, or the occupants refused the owner entry to fix it. One catch: those specific defenses do not apply to property maintenance code charges, which cover a lot of what actually gets cited. You can still contest whether a violation happened at all; what you lose in a property maintenance case is the ready-made list.

Do not skip the hearing. A no-show with proper service can mean a default: the case is decided without you and the order is served on you within five days. You have 21 days to petition to undo a default for good cause, and no deadline at all if the city never properly served you.

If you lose and think the decision is wrong, you can appeal to the McHenry County circuit court under the state's Administrative Review Law.

What the Cases Look Like

The city's own hearing records give a sense of the scale. Since August 2025, the hearing officer has held a docket at city hall most months; the records the city produced show no hearings from December through March. Across those dockets the caseload has grown: a handful of cases in the program's first months, rising to 22 on the June docket this year. The fines run small, mostly $50 to $250; the largest on any docket the city produced is $400. The violations are what you would expect from code enforcement: tall grass and weeds, junk and unlicensed vehicles parked on lawns and streets, exterior property upkeep, garbage, and nuisance complaints. Far more citations get written than ever reach a hearing: citation numbers on this year's tickets run into the 500s, while no docket has listed more than two dozen cases. The system is designed to resolve most of them earlier, when the owner corrects the problem and passes inspection. Hearings are held at city hall, 132 E. Prairie St., entering at the municipal parking lot entrance, and are open to the public.

If You Do Not Pay

This is the part of the ordinance residents most need to know, because the collection tools are real.

Once the window for court review has passed, an unpaid fine becomes a debt to the city, enforceable like a court judgment. The ordinance authorizes liens on your real estate or personal property or both, collection through private agencies, and the post-judgment tools that come with a court judgment, which under Illinois law include wage garnishment.

Two provisions go further. First, 14 days after a debt notice, the city may refuse to issue or renew any license, permit, or zoning approval you apply for until the debt is paid. Owe an adjudication fine, and your building permit can wait. Second, for building code violations, the order attaches to the property itself, not just the owner. Selling the property does not clear it; the buyer inherits the order.

Parking Tickets Run Through Here Too

Parking, standing, and vehicle equipment tickets are also adjudicated in-house now. Police and community service officers issue them, and unpaid tickets escalate through second notices to a final determination. One provision here is a dead letter: the ordinance says that at ten or more unpaid parking tickets, the city can ask the state to suspend the owner's driver's license. Illinois ended license suspensions for unpaid parking tickets in 2020 and repealed the statute the ordinance cites in 2021, four years before Marengo adopted it, so no such process exists. If you do not live in Marengo, you can contest a ticket entirely in writing without coming to a hearing, but the challenge must be signed under oath and submitted at least 14 days before the hearing date on the notice.

Why the City Did This

From the city's perspective, there are practical reasons to prefer this system. Taking a tall-grass case to circuit court is slow and costs money in filing fees and attorney time, and courthouse schedules do not bend for a small town's code docket. An in-house hearing is faster and cheaper for the city, and arguably for the resident too, since the hearing is in town instead of in Woodstock.

Marengo Weekly reviewed public circuit court records: the city filed 222 ordinance cases at the county courthouse in 2025, its busiest year since 2019, and filings have continued at a similar pace this year. The new program has so far been an addition to that court activity, not a replacement for it.

There is also a money side. When a case runs through the city's own program, the fine is set under the city's own ordinance and stays with the city. Court-imposed assessments and fee splits that apply at the courthouse do not apply at city hall.

How the Hearing Officer Was Chosen

Marengo did not hire a new hearing officer when it created the administrative adjudication program. Instead, it expanded the responsibilities of attorney Mollie Dahlin, who was already serving as the city's hearing officer for police-related adjudication matters, including vehicle impound hearings.

While reporting this story, Marengo Weekly asked the city how that appointment occurred, because Chapter 45 states that the hearing officer is appointed by the city administrator with the advice and consent of the city council, but the ordinance itself does not identify an appointee. City Administrator Derik Morefield pointed us to the June 18, 2025 staff memo presented alongside the ordinance, which informed the council that the attorney already serving as the city's police hearing officer would be appointed to the expanded role. The council subsequently adopted the ordinance. There was no separate vote on the appointment itself; according to the city, that action, taken with the memo before it, was the council's advice and consent.

We also asked whether the city keeps a record confirming Dahlin completed the training the ordinance requires. It does not keep one on file, but at our request the city provided Dahlin's own account of it: a 40-hour hearing-officer course at the National Judicial College before she became a hearing officer, plus the continuing legal education Illinois requires of practicing attorneys, including hours in professional responsibility, diversity, and mental health and substance abuse. By that account, she came to the role with formal hearing-officer training, which is the kind of preparation the ordinance calls for.

If You Get a Notice

• Read it carefully and note the hearing date. Do not ignore it. A no-show usually means the case is decided without you.
• You can contest it. Bring anything that supports your side: photos, receipts, a witness.
• Fix first, then pay. On the city's own notice, paying a ticket without correcting and passing inspection just earns you a second ticket.
• Hearings are public and held most months at city hall. You can sit in on one before your own date to see how they run.
• You will not face jail time in this venue. You can face fines, the city's hearing costs, community service, and orders to fix the problem. An unfixed violation can be cited repeatedly, unpaid fines can be collected like court judgments, including by lien and wage garnishment, and unpaid debts can hold up your city permits.
• If you miss a hearing, act fast: you have 21 days to ask that a default be set aside.
• If you lose and believe the decision is wrong, you have the right to appeal to the circuit court.
• Fixing the underlying problem before the hearing date never hurts, and in many code cases it is the whole point.

Marengo Weekly reviewed Chapter 45 of the Marengo Municipal Code (adopted June 23, 2025), the Illinois statutes it adopts (65 ILCS 5/1-2.2 and 625 ILCS 5/11-208.3), the city's July 2026 response to a public records request for the program's setup and hearing records, the June 2025 city council packet for the ordinance's adoption, correspondence with the city administrator, city council minutes from 2023 through 2026, council packet bill lists from 2023 through 2026, the hearing officer's law firm website, a published 2014 Illinois Appellate Court decision, and public McHenry County circuit court records for this article.