Tuesday night, according to the Northwest Herald’s Jim Butts, at the instigation of Ralph Dawson, the Crystal Lake City Council discussed the illegal motion to reconsider made, apparently inadvertently, by Councilwoman Ellen Brady Mueller and accepted by Mayor Aaron Shepley.

The city council is run pretty informally, so Mueller can be excused for her mistake.

Shepley is an attorney, however, as he periodically reminds audience members.

He should have known better than to accept such an inappropriate motion.

The issue at hand was the council’s defeat of the re-zoning for a baseball stadium requested by McHenry County College.

The council needed to muster 5 votes to approve the motion, but only got four.

After that vote, Mueller, one of the four-member majority that had lost the vote moved to reconsider.

Shepley illegally accepted the motion and announced it passed by a 4-3 vote.

None of the three councilmen on the winning side of the baseball stadium zoning vote raised the relevant point of order.

Butts quotes Mueller as saying the following:

“I made the motion with the best of intentions. It just left the door open. … I wasn’t trying to undercut anyone or anything like that.”

The honorable thing to do for the majority to do more than imitate my son and say,

The honorable thing to do would be for them not to ever reconsider the issue without having McHenry County College go back to square one.

Just saying or acting as if they were saying,

is not honorable.

Having John Cowlin intone that the vote stands because no one objected is to allow a parliamentary misstep to thwart those who won the vote.

And, by the way, why didn’t Cowlin, who was sitting at the dais, remind Mayor Shepley that he was making a mistake?

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The picture on the top left is Crystal Lake City Councilwoman Ellen Brady Mueller. On the top right is Mayor Aaron Shepley. At the bottom is City Attorney John Cowlin.