It's more than a week since Dixon Illinois discovered Rita Crundwell stole 30 million dollars in city funds. Crundwell's been released on bond, but no one's seen her, and the 15,000 or so residents of Dixon are still in an apparent shock.
"It's a pretty tough deal to swallow for everybody," says Mayor Jim Burke.
The FBI continues to probe into Crundwell's activities as the city's comptroller, trying to figure out how she hid such a huge amount of money. One thing they have told city leaders, Dixon will receive as much of that 30 million dollars as possible although it's highly unlikely they'll ever get it all back.
"The FBI has told us that but I would think that the city would recover a substantial part of the assets with this," says Burke.
Over the past couple of years Dixon had been forced to cut its city workforce from 102 employees down to 88. They thought declining tax revenue was the culprit but now they know better.
"It showed that we were able to continue to operate even with this going on. We have a pretty lean operation up here," says Burke.
Mayor Jim Burke says Dixon is still in the very beginning stages of the recovery process. It’ll take quite a while before the city gets its money back. But the hope is as the money returns so will the jobs that have been cut in recent years. Burke says there's plenty of work to do, but it seems the worst is over.
"We'll come out of this thing and we'll have a stronger city when we're completed with this," says Mayor Burke.
The 14 city jobs cut in Dixon over the last couple years came through attrition. But the hope is to eventually bring the city back up to full staff.