Details about the weird world of former Macomb County clerk Karen Spranger keep pouring forth, several months after she was removed from office.
The Detroit Free Press reported yesterday that Spranger admitted in a court deposition earlier this year that she decided to run in 2016 as a Republican, rather than a Democrat, by flipping a coin. “I just closed my eyes and said a prayer and I had a coin and I flipped it,” Spranger recalled, according to court records.
The significance of this strange behavior is that, if the coin had landed a different way, Spranger would have run as a Democrat and would probably have lost. She defeated Democrat Fred Miller in November 2016, with Donald Trump at the top of the GOP ticket, but Miller, a former state representative and county commissioner, almost certainly would have beaten her in the prior Democratic primary race. He still might have lost in November 2016 but Spranger’s traumatic 15-month reign as clerk never would have happened.
Chris Hall of the Free Press dug out the coin flip story and other bizarre nuggets about Spranger by scouring through deposition transcripts in a lawsuit filed by Spranger’s two original deputy clerks, Paul Kardasz and Erin Stahl. Both appointees were abruptly fired by the clerk within several weeks of Spranger taking office in January 2017 and they sued, claiming they were ousted after playing the role of whistleblowers.
The kookiest comments in the depositions revealed that Spranger wanted the county to expand the number toilets in the clerk’s office by installing indoor versions of outhouses. Each additional toilet would sit over a hole in the floor filled with worms that eat feces. No plumbing necessary, she said.
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