Poling Investigation: “You are merely the caretaker of the buildings”

On September 2, 2026, the Grant County Commissioners met in special session and voted, 2–0 with Commissioner Chuck Poling abstaining, to make public a 30-page internal investigation report about him. They then voted 2–1, Poling opposed, to adopt the actions it recommends, and directed that the report and the evidence behind it go to the Indiana State Police, a prosecutor without a conflict, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana and the State Board of Accounts.

The county published the report and its evidence the same afternoon: the document above, fifteen witness interviews, and a data room of several hundred files. This page is a summary of the report, section by section, in the report's own order. Every claim on it opens the page it comes from: the report, the transcript of the witness who said it, the exhibit it rests on, or the county's recording of the session. Tap a card to read the page. Tap "the whole of page" under it to open the document itself.

Read everything here as: the report says that a witness said so. The report is not a court finding, no charge has been filed, and no witness has been cross-examined. Where a document qualifies what the report says, this page says so. Where OurWeek checked a figure against the underlying record, it says what it found.

Contents. What this document is, and is not · Section 1: intimidation · Section 2: the cameras · Section 3: the plumbing business · Section 4: the primary · Section 5: retaliation · Section 6: medical leave and HR · Section 7: boards, hires and contracts · Section 8: the statutes and the vote · Poling's response · What we checked · What happens next · The witnesses

What this document is, and is not

It is an internal investigation ordered by two of the three commissioners and written by two outside attorneys the county retained. County human resources reported complaints from employees and elected officials in the last week of July 2026. The county attorney, who had represented Poling before, stepped aside. A memorandum dated July 28 appointed Gary Johnson of Beckman Lawson to lead the work, and he retained Martha Lemert of Burt Blee to conduct it. She interviewed fifteen witnesses between July 28 and August 24.

The two commissioners who ordered it are not the two who voted on it. Shane Middlesworth resigned effective August 2, while the interviews were still running. Chris Oliver, chosen at a Republican caucus on August 20, holds that seat and made both motions on September 2.

It is not a court finding, a verdict or a charge. The report says so itself, in the section that lists the statutes its allegations could implicate: it "assumes, solely for purposes of legal issue spotting," that the allegations are credited, and it is "not a charging decision, final legal opinion, or ruling." Every potential violation, it says, is "subject to additional review by investigation authorities with subpoena power."

It is not an independent inquiry either. It was ordered by the commissioners who serve alongside its subject and carried out by lawyers working for the county. The county has not said what it cost.

Before the report was finished, the consulting county attorney, Edward Ormsby, telephoned Poling on the evening of August 23 to put the preliminary findings to him. The report's account of that fourteen-minute call is on its first page. It is the attorney's description, not a recording.

The report groups what it found into seven categories, and an eighth section lists the state and federal statutes each could implicate. This page follows that order.

Section 1: intimidation and threats

The section opens with what the report calls the criminal history "known to county employees," a passage that rests on newspaper clippings, a 1998 federal appellate opinion and what witnesses recalled hearing. The report itself states that the record was expunged. OurWeek is not repeating that passage. It is on printed page 2, and the reasons for leaving it out are at the foot of this page.

The rest of the section is first-hand. County Administrator Beth Winters, who is also the HR director, described a November 5, 2025 meeting about moving the clerk's files off the courthouse's fourth floor, which the fire inspector had found unsafe for the weight. Her account is in the report, in her interview, and in a statement she wrote that day.

Two and a half months later, on January 27, 2026, she says Poling walked her by the shoulder into the sixth-floor conference room, the one room on that floor without a camera, and stood inches from her for about forty minutes. The HR coordinator told the investigator she saw him take her in.

Health Department Administrator Tara Street described February 7, 2025, outside the HR office, over a septic complaint that involved drain work by Poling's plumbing business. The HR manager at the time, Justin Saathoff, watched it from his office. The county's former health officer, Dr. Brenda Woods, named it in her resignation letter. Street's own dated documentation is in the file, beginning with a December 5, 2024 visit to her office and Poling's email to her that afternoon.

County Clerk Pam Harris described July 1, 2025, in her office, over where the clerk's shredding would go. Deputies were called, and the report says county video shows Poling escorted from the building. Nine employees wrote statements that week. Three are below: the clerk's and two from the prosecutor's investigators. The deputy who walked the two men out wrote his own report that day, and the prosecutor's office sent the statements to the Indiana State Police the next afternoon; the state police detective assigned asked for the footage three weeks later. The county published six camera exports from that morning, none with sound, from the first-floor elevator hall to the security exit; three open on the cards, and the county's folder holds all six. No camera covers the inside of the clerk's office.

A treasurer's office employee described her last day there, July 9, 2026, when she says Poling put his arm around her and walked her into the break room, out of camera view, to talk her out of a transfer to the clerk's office. A coworker read the investigator the text message she sent at 8:59 that morning.

An employee reported to the HR manager that on or about January 30, 2025, Poling opened his coat at an elevator and said he had almost pulled his gun on her. She saw no gun. The HR manager's note to file from the next day, which the report cites, records Poling's answer at the time: that he had said it, as a joke, and that he does not carry a gun. Nine months later the commissioners adopted an ordinance authorizing themselves to carry firearms in county buildings. The county attorney presented it under new business on October 6, 2025. The president asked the members for questions or comments; the recording carries none, and it passed on Poling's motion and Stewart's second, 3-0. It does not appear on any earlier commissioners recording in OurWeek's corpus, and the county's minutes index returns no earlier mention of it. The statute that governs county ordinances treats one as adopted when the presiding officer signs it and sets no requirement that it be read at more than one meeting.

Three more accounts in the section come from elected officials and court staff: the recorder, on a parking-lot argument under her umbrella; the clerk, on the February 2024 election board meeting where she says Poling invited the chairman outside; and a court bailiff, on the May 19, 2025 commissioners meeting, where she was speaking on courthouse conditions; the statement she had prepared is in the file. The county's recordings of the election board meeting and the commissioners meeting are on their cards, and so is the parking-lot camera's export of September 27, 2024, which has no sound.

One item in this section has a published explanation the report does not mention. The report cites a newspaper's audio recording of minutes missing from the county's own video of that May 19 meeting; the county's copy of that recording, thirty minutes long, is in the data room. In the Chronicle-Tribune's May 24, 2025 follow-up, county IT director Marcus Elliott took responsibility for the gap and described it as an accident: when the board president said "we're done" and brought the gavel down, he assumed the meeting had ended and closed the recording software, restarting a minute or two later. Readers weighing the next section should know that the one recording failure in the file was publicly explained at the time by the same IT director whose testimony the report relies on.

Section 2: the cameras, and the audio

This is the section the report documents most heavily, and the one where the county's own records can be checked. The commissioners control the camera system. An IT ticket from January 2, 2025 records how the three divided their oversight. On February 3, 2025 a ticket in Commissioner Middlesworth's name restricted camera access to the commissioners, the sheriff's department and IT; within days the prosecutor's chief investigator and the EMS director were writing to the help desk that they were locked out, and IT told each that the commissioners had ordered it. That July, asked by a state police detective for the July 1 courthouse footage, the chief investigator wrote that the prosecutor's office no longer had access. In October 2025 Poling asked IT for a camera covering the entrance to the commissioners' office, the meeting room and the administrator's office. A ticket from July 2025 records audio being switched on in the clerk's office and the courthouse elevator on two commissioners' instruction. The county's written policy for the system authorizes the commissioners' office, the sheriff, IT and anyone the commissioners designate, and says nothing about audio.

On July 31, 2026, three days after the investigation was commissioned, Elliott says Poling telephoned him and asked for audio to be turned on for the camera over the HR desk, and not to tell anyone. Elliott says he did it, told no one, and opened a ticket for his own record. The ticket is timed at 9:16 a.m.

The report then counts. From the camera platform's user log it reports 4,870 events on Poling's account between May 21 and August 24, including 349 viewing sessions of the HR-desk camera and 137 audio changes. The county published two exports of that log, and OurWeek counted both. The longer runs May 21 to August 16 and has 3,971 rows; the shorter runs August 19 to 23 and has 899. Every row in each is under his user name. Together they hold 4,870 rows and 137 audio changes, the report's two figures exactly; the HR-desk camera accounts for 349 viewing sessions, counting each live stream once, which is the report's third; and the audio changes on August 20, the day county legal ordered audio off, number twelve, which is the figure the report gives.

County legal had the audio disabled on Thursday, August 20. What the report says happened over the next four days comes from the two IT employees and from Poling's own email. On Friday, Poling came to the IT office asking who had given the order, and Elliott sent him to legal. After Elliott left for the day, a second IT employee says Poling came back with two maintenance employees, asked for the audio to be restored, spoke of the other commissioners in a way that sounded to him like approval, and said that nothing about the investigation should leave IT without two commissioners' approval, HR and county legal included. He turned the audio back on Monday morning. No vote had been taken.

On Saturday, August 22, Poling wrote to the county attorney, copying the county administrator, the consulting attorney and Commissioner Stewart. It is the one written statement by him in the file.

In a follow-up interview, Elliott said Poling had been having IT back up the county administrator's and HR coordinator's email since around April or May, on the stated reason that they might leave and delete files. Elliott said Poling had no access to the backups, had not asked to read them, and that commissioners cannot read employee email. The report's legal section says the concern there "may be more about preservation, monitoring, retaliation, and control of HR evidence than a completed unauthorized-access violation."

Section 3: the plumbing business, the invoices and the deed

Poling owns Chuck's Sewer & Drain Cleaning, Inc. The county uses it. The report puts the invoices from February 2025 to June 5, 2026 at $56,630. The county administrator, who processes the claims, told the investigator the business is used "exclusively" for plumbing and drain work, without a contract or bids, at about $60,000 a year, on bills that say little more than where the work was done. The commissioners approve the claims at their meetings. She recalled one meeting where he abstained.

The report says county maintenance employees were paid, including overtime, on the same dates and projects as the business on at least two occasions, March 24 and June 5, 2026. The time cards and the 105 pages of invoices are in the data room's financial folder, linked below. This page has not matched them line by line.

Two witnesses described a drain machine: Poling lent the county his, the county ordered a new one, and the new one, the HR coordinator says, went to his business. The county's invoice for the new machine, $1,210.41, is in the file.

Saathoff also described a dispute with the clerk over Poling's conflict-of-interest forms for 2022 and 2023, years he served on the county council. They were filed in April 2025, when he was a commissioner, and Saathoff told the investigator Poling said the clerk had lost them. The county's recording of the April 7, 2025 commissioners meeting carries the exchange. As the county attorney presents the two prior-year forms, they are described as misplaced by the clerk's office, and the clerk answers from the floor that they were not misplaced, her office had not received them. The board accepted both that morning, Poling abstaining, and the report says the clerk stamped them received the same day.

His conflict-of-interest filings name the plumbing company. They do not name Chomp Properties, a real estate company the county administrator identified as his. On March 9, 2026, eight weeks before the primary, Chomp Properties deeded a Marion lot the county assesses at $37,100 to Digital Marketing Productions LLC for a stated $0. The Secretary of State records that company as formed in December 2024 by Edward Bounds, whose podcast and social media pages carry local political advertising. Witnesses said candidates aligned with Poling got advertising there and candidates who were not were told there was no space, and the report says none of the aligned candidates' campaign finance filings show a payment to Bounds. The report raises the question. It does not answer it, and neither does this page.

The report names a second outlet in the same allegation: Channel 27 News and Entertainment, whose owner it names beside Bounds. After the report's release, Channel 27 published its own account of it, disclosing that Poling "has been a longtime paying advertiser and sponsor of Channel 27," that the page is referenced in the report, and that neither relationship would keep it from reporting the story. The post ends: "As a matter of fact, this story was brought to you by Chuck's Sewer Drain and Plumbing." The county's own exhibit folder holds screenshots of the kind of material the report means: a Channel 27 courthouse update quoting Poling on the elevator with the sponsor line under it, and a post by Bounds promoting a candidate for clerk.

The former HR manager and the clerk each raised the renovation of the former Salin Bank building, which the county bought for offices: whether the work was split into pieces small enough to stay under Indiana's public bidding threshold. The report lists the records that would answer it and does not resolve it.

Section 4: the primary

On March 24, 2026, six weeks before the May 5 primary, Poling walked commissioner candidate Ed Hartman through county offices with two maintenance employees. An assessor's office employee, eating lunch at her desk, says Poling asked whether she was going to vote and then, close to her ear, told her that if she voted for Hartman she would be able to get a raise. The report says camera video with audio confirms her account. The county's data room holds screen recordings of that camera, with sound, for two visits four days apart: March 20, about office supplies, and March 24, the tour. She told the investigator the words can be heard "if you listen very, very closely." Both recordings are on the cards. The county's camera system logged the whole tour as an incident, thirty clips from sixteen cameras between 10:48 and 11:31; its own timeline is on a card, inside an archive too large to host. Forty minutes after the tour left her office, the assessor asked HR for the counter footage "along with voice," and the employee wrote her account by hand that day. The HR coordinator recalled Hartman on the sixth floor the same day.

The report also places here the county-paid listening sessions on the Exit 255 feasibility study, the subject of OurWeek's data center report. In the county administrator's account, the second session, in Fowlerton, became a campaign event when Poling stood up, and the other two commissioners stopped paying for them. That is her characterization, and the report adopts it.

Section 5: retaliation

The fifth section gathers accounts of people who left offices aligned with Poling, or disagreed with him, and then faced attempted discipline, blocked transfers or threats to their jobs. Several of its examples appear elsewhere on this page: the clerk's July 2025 encounter, the treasurer's office employee's transfer, the IT director's account of August 21. The rest are below.

Saathoff's employment ended at the end of May 2025, within two weeks of the May 19 meeting. The report records the bailiff's concern that her remark at that meeting, that she had not gotten a response from the commissioners, had cost him his job, and his own account: the response he drafted was not approved until the Friday before, which he called an excuse, saying Poling wanted his own person in the role. The Chronicle-Tribune reported on August 15, 2025 that Commissioner Stewart said the dismissal was Middlesworth's decision and that he had advised against it, and that Middlesworth said the county does not comment on personnel matters. On July 1, 2025, on Poling's motion, the commissioners moved Winters into the administrative executive position and appointed Felicity Miller HR director.

Section 6: medical leave, accommodations and the HR desk

Three things sit here. Employees with doctors' notes for lamps, air purifiers and heaters, whose requests the report says maintenance leadership resisted. An employee's protected medical leave, which the report says was discussed on a podcast in July 2025 by a figure it describes as aligned with Poling; the county administrator told the investigator she could not confirm where that information came from. And the camera over the HR desk, which the report says is why employees stopped bringing concerns to HR.

OurWeek is not itemizing the medical-leave allegation beyond that sentence. Naming the employee and her diagnosis here would repeat what the report treats as the harm.

Section 7: boards, hires and contracts

The report lists appointments and hires it says were connected to Poling: the area plan director, members of the area plan commission and the drainage board, the maintenance director, relatives in county-adjacent jobs. Most of that rests on the county administrator's account and on public appointment records the report cites but this page has not pulled. Two items have documents.

The commissioners reappointed Brandi Poling, who runs the plumbing business, to the county health board in December 2025. The health officer at the time, Dr. Brenda Woods, gave notice the same day, citing the statute that bars anyone with a financial interest in the department's decisions from serving on its board. The health department permits and inspects septic systems.

The county's cleaning contract. An auditor's office employee who runs a cleaning business says Poling told her what to put in her bid and what to ask for. The contractor who holds the contract told investigators he felt pressure to keep Poling's daughter and the maintenance director's daughter on his payroll, because the contract can be canceled on thirty days' notice.

Section 8: the statutes, and what the board did

Section 8 lists the laws the seven categories could implicate. Federal: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act, First and Fourth Amendment claims, the ADA, the FMLA and Title VII. Indiana: official misconduct, bribery, ghost employment, conflict of interest, election law, intimidation, battery and criminal confinement, obstruction, false informing, theft and conversion, fraud, and stalking. The report's own caveat governs all of it: this is issue spotting on the assumption that the allegations are true, and on Title VII in particular it says the record "appears stronger" on other theories.

Then subsection 8.6, which the commissioners adopted in full on a 2–1 vote.

Commissioner Poling's response

Everything he has said on this record:

• He abstained on the vote to release the report: "I'll abstain. This is about me."
• He voted against adopting the recommended actions.
• Offered the floor at the end of the session, he said nothing.
• On August 22 he emailed the county attorney asking who had ordered the camera audio off and why, writing that it takes two commissioners to make decisions and that he had not been consulted. The email is in the file and on this page, in section 2.
• In January 2025, according to the HR manager's note the report cites, he said the elevator remark was a joke and that he does not carry a gun.
• The report's account of the August 23 call is the attorney's, not his.

Later on September 2 he told IndyPolitics.Org: "I have no comment because I just found all this out myself today." WISH-TV reported the same day that he had not responded to its I-Team. Readers can weigh that against page 1 of the report, which describes the county's attorney putting the preliminary findings to him by telephone on August 23.

He remains a sitting county commissioner. If he issues a statement or disputes any part of the report, this page will carry it, and OurWeek will ask him for one.

What we checked ourselves

The report cites the county's own records, and some of them can be counted.

• The camera log. The August 17–24 export has 899 rows, every one under Poling's user name, dated August 19 through 23. Twelve audio changes on August 20 match the report's figure. The export also records four audio changes on the HR-desk camera between 3:18 and 3:54 in the morning of August 19, as it prints the times. The longer export, May 21 to August 16, has 3,971 rows, all under his name; with the shorter export's 899 that is 4,870, the report's total, and the two carry 137 audio changes between them, the report's count. Both exports are linked below.
• The timing of the audio request. The appointing memorandum is dated July 28. The ticket for the HR-camera audio is timed 9:16 a.m. on July 31.
• The deed. Recorded March 9, 2026, stated consideration $0, from Chomp Properties Inc. to Digital Marketing Productions LLC. The assessment record for the parcel, in the data room, shows $37,100.
• The disclosure forms. Sixteen pages of filings, 2022 through 2026. The plumbing company appears on them. No real estate company does.
• Two small discrepancies in the report, noted for the record. It attributes the audio recording of the May 19, 2025 meeting to the Chronicle Tribune on printed page 4 and to a "Chronicle Gazette" on printed page 6. On page 4 it dates the election board meeting to "2023 or 2024"; the board's recording is dated February 27, 2024.
• Spellings. The county's automatic captions render the name "Polling"; the report and county records spell it Poling. Where the captions and a document differ, this page follows the document.

What happens next

A referral is a request. The county has been directed to hand the report and its evidence to the Indiana State Police, a conflict-free prosecutor, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana and the State Board of Accounts. None of those agencies has said anything publicly. A referral does not mean an investigation has been opened, and an investigation would not mean charges.

A special prosecutor may be needed. The report says that if the Grant County prosecutor has an actual or apparent conflict, counsel should ask a court to appoint one. The prosecutor's chief investigator is a witness.

The State Board of Accounts is the one to watch on money. It audits Indiana local government as a matter of routine. Procurement, ghost employment, equipment and public funds are its ordinary work, and its findings become public documents.

The commissioners cannot remove him. What passed on September 2 removes Poling's individual control over county functions. It does not remove him from office. Removing an elected county official in Indiana does not run through the county board.

The county party has weighed in. On September 2 the chairman of the Grant County Republican Party, Nick McKinley, issued a statement calling the allegations "deeply troubling," supporting the referrals to independent authorities, and saying that witnesses must be protected and that Poling is entitled to due process.

The evidence is supposed to be preserved. Subsection 8.5 lists what the county is to hold: camera logs, help desk tickets, email backup records, invoices and time cards, the March 24 tour footage, the July 1, 2025 courthouse footage and the listening-session records. If those turn out to be incomplete, that itself is a story.

The fifteen witnesses

The table below lists each witness, what they addressed and where to read the interview. Elected and appointed officials are named. Other county employees are identified by their office. The county published every name; repeating them here adds nothing a reader needs, and each transcript is one tap away.

How this page was made, and what we left out

Every card opens a page. The report's cards open the county's PDF at the page quoted, with the sentence boxed. Witness cards open the county's interview transcript. The county published those as Word files, and OurWeek converted them to PDF so they would have page numbers and searchable text; the page numbers on the cards are ours, and the county's files are linked from every card and from the witness table. Exhibits open the county's own PDFs, except the help desk tickets and the camera log, which the county published as spreadsheets. Those cards open OurWeek's rendering of the export, with the file name, a checksum and the rendering date printed on every sheet. Recordings open the county's video of the September 2 session at the second cited.

We are quoting the report, not confirming it. OurWeek has not interviewed the fifteen witnesses or examined the invoices line by line. Where this page says something happened, read it as: the report says a witness said so. The county's six camera exports from July 1, 2025 open on this page from its data room; OurWeek looked at them to identify each camera and the minutes it covers, and has not reviewed any other footage. Where the report says video corroborates an account, that is the report's characterization. Where OurWeek counted something itself, the page says so in the section headed "What we checked ourselves."

We are not repeating the expunged criminal record. Section 1 opens with a passage on Poling's criminal history as discussed among county employees. The report itself states that he obtained expungement of that record. Indiana law treats expunged records differently from ordinary public records, and parts of that passage rest on newspaper clippings and on what witnesses recalled hearing rather than on court records the report produces. The report also floats, and immediately concedes would need "further corroboration," a claim about his eligibility to hold office. We are not printing any of it. It is in the PDF at printed page 2 if you want to read it.

We name officials, not staff. Elected and appointed officials, and the heads of county departments, are named. Rank-and-file county employees who described what happened to them are identified by their office. A quotation is the witness's own words and is left as spoken. That applies with particular force to the employee whose medical leave the report treats as a privacy violation, who is not named or described here beyond the fact of the allegation.

Four kinds of file we do not link directly. A named employee's discrimination charge and the medical detail in it; the criminal-history clippings; private text messages between two employees; and a court order about a third party's own expungement. All are reachable through the county's folders.

If you find something we got wrong, tell us and we will correct it on this page, with a note saying what changed.