Part 4 – An Open Letter to Wonder Lake about the Creation of a Library District

An open letter from Wonder Lake Resident Jeff Gerhardt, Wonder Lake Community Tech Center:

PREDATORY ACTIVITIES:
Understanding the predatory activities of the two libraries is a major goal of this email. Both districts have made active attempts to kill the process of Wonder Lake developing their own library. What you should know is that we offered extremely generous negotiating terms as a starting point to induce them to come to the table to work out an agreement that would allow all parties to come out of the process as equal partners with as little negative impact as possible.

The response was BOTH library districts colluded (worked together secretly) in the act of going to local political figures to try stop our local library development team. Although not an illegal act, it showed great disrespect to not only the people from the Library Development Committee, but disrespect to the tax payers in Wonder Lake.

Because of this predatory stance in the face of a very generous offer, it can only be presumed that McHenry and Woodstock are content with the arrangement of sucking tax dollars from our community and giving us little in return. We have been asking for the better part of a year, for them to simply take the gracious step of thanking Wonder Lake for the MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that we have contributed to each library. They will not even do that, and this is the TIP of the Predatory Iceberg.

Some of the outrageous behaviors by people in the library districts are simply hard to believe, and even make claim of agreements that basically usurp power from the Harrison School District. If you read the longer Open Letter you will get a clearer picture of these outrages.

TIME FOR ACTION
We need help from people willing to go to subdivision meetings to circulate petitions. We also need people willing to go to other events like the 4th of July Parade and during Ski Shows, to sit in a booth and collect signatures.

The purpose of the petitions is to accomplish the following changes:

1- To secede from BOTH the Rural Woodstock and McHenry library districts
2- To create a local Library District with two branches, one on each side of the lake
3- To create a local Library Board and approve an interim slate of board members to get the library established.
4- To approve a plan to equalize the library taxes across the community at slightly above the state legal minimum for library taxes.
5- To create a tax abatement program for seniors and low income folks in our community

WE NEED YOUR HELP
1- We need volunteers to help with petitions.
2- We need people to serve on an interim Library Board
3- We need volunteers to work a couple hours a week at the library branches while we get scaled up and to the point where we can hire some staff
4- We need donations of money to fight this battle.

And come the fall, we will again be asking for donations of books. At the moment we have too many to store already.

NOTE: donations given for the purpose of this petition campaign CAN NOT by law be tax deductible as are other donations to the Wonder Lake Community Development Council. It would also be a violation of the law to spend WLCDC contributed general funds, not contributed specifically for this purpose.

We need to cover printing, mailing, legal fees and filing fees. The total cost for the entire community will be around $5,000.00. With luck a lawyer or two may come forward to do the legal work pro-bono as that is about 1/3 of the cost.

So folks, if you want to see a library in Wonder Lake, FIRST VOLUNTEER, then gently twist the arm of a lawyer you know, and then please send a check made payable to the “Wonder Lake Library Referendum Fund” and mail them to:

Wonder Lake CDC
7518 Hancock Drive
Wonder Lake, IL 60097

Yours,
Jeff Gerhardt
Wonder Lake Resident
Wonder Lake Community Tech Center


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