The following statement was released by District 3 County Board member Mike Walkup. He announces why he won’t vote for fellow District 3 Board member Joe Gottemoller for County Board Chairman. The vote for the next McHenry County Board Chairman will be held Monday morning at a meeting which begins at 9 AM.
Mike Walkup
You don’t have to raise chickens to know that you shouldn’t put the fox in charge of the hen house.
McHenry County still ranks as one of the fastest growing counties in the United States.
No matter how you look at it, we are on the cusp of the development curve in our region.
From 1990 to 2008 we went from under 200,000 people to over 300,000.
We are predicted to top 400,000 in the coming decades.
Joe Gottemoller
One of the architects for that growth was Joe Gottemoller and his law firm.I have heard Joe described as the ‘consigliore’ of McHenry County developers.
Now some people on this Board want to make him County Board Chair.
This is an inherent conflict of interest.
We need to look no further to confirm this than a scant few months ago when Joe represented a power plant company in Oakwood Hills, against the wishes of over 1000 of his own County Board District 3 constituents.
Image what would happen if he were Chairman of the County Board.
Wouldn’t the public feel that the county was behind any development proposals that were being represented by his firm’s clients? Wouldn’t new clients flock to his law firm for that very reason?
Wouldn’t Joe be able to enrich himself as a result of his public position, without needing to even do anything besides just holding the position?
How long will it be before some of those chickens come home to roost?
That is why I will be supporting Jim Heisler for County Board Chair at Monday’s organizational meeting.
I have known Jim for most of my life. Our families go back a long time together.
My father even stood up at his father’s wedding.
We served together for several years on the Crystal Lake Historic Preservation Commission.
Jim has been on the County Board for over 20 years.
He has served on most if not all of the committees, and is currently Vice Chair.
He has already had to assume the duties of Chair on several occasions. He knows county government like few others.
Jim has no interests that would conflict with being County Board Chair.
He will not likely be selling a lot of additional pairs of shoes just because he is the Chair of the County Board.
He is not on the beginning of a life long career path seeking to use the position of County Board Chair as a springboard to other things.
This is no reflection on anyone’s competence to be County Board Chair.
Both candidates have shown that they can run a meeting.
It is simply a matter of looking at the outside business interests of each candidate.
For one, those interests pose a big problem, in my opinion.
For the other, they do not.
I think it is fair to say that we are in the middle of a crisis of confidence in this position.
We should not be in denial about this.
All eyes are upon us in this last time that we select the Board Chair from amongst ourselves.
We accomplish nothing, however, and may do more harm, if we just substitute one set of problems for another.
I therefore wish to announce in advance that I will be voting for Jim Heisler for McHenry County Board Chairman.
If Mike Walkup backed Jesus Christ for County Board Chairman, I’d have to vote against him
Mr. Walkup:
Why would you judge a lawyer by his clients?
If you owned a store, would you limit your customers to only those with whom you agreed?
I have known Joe Gottemoller to be nothing but honorable, not only in his law practice but personally and in his politics.
Are you against responsible development in McHenry County?
To suggest that Mr. Gottemoller would give the wolves the keys to the henhouse suggests you have ulterior motives in making that assertion.
Pull-ease!
He needs to just go.
Gottemoller resigned as the Grafton Township attorney in 2010 leaving the township in a losing situation.
He resigned from the Power Plant people leaving the Oakwood folks in a bad situation.
Joe took money from both government bodies.
Now he’s back at Grafton when things are easier.
Is this the kind of leader we need on the county board?
Neither of these clowns should be the next leader of the McHenry County Board!
Amen to HadEnough.
Jonathan J. Knight: You may want to read the minutes from P & D meetings chaired by Gottemoller.
Joe has one goal: M-O-N-E-Y and P-O-W-E-R.
He is well suited to work for the guy in the White House but has NO clue how to represent / S-E-R-V-E the average citizen.
Gottemoller took the position that representing a power plant adversarial to the health, safety, and wellbeing of the citizens of a village within McHenry County did not violate Public Officer Prohibited Activities Act (50 ILCS 105/3 (from Chapter 102, par.3)), and we must assume that his ethical analysis of future situations will be similar.
The power plant zoning variance was to be rewarded by a board of Oakwood Hills, which is a subsection of this County.
So technically the County Board would not vote at that juncture.
But if the power plant achieved the zoning status sought, it would have put McHenry County in the defensive position of needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight this incursion by a for-profit entity which would have commanded free access to a huge percentage of the available groundwater of the entire county (and beyond).
Further, the property value devaluation projected for homes within a five mile radius of the plant would have lowered tax revenue for the county (even net factoring-in the taxes projected to be paid by plant) so all citizens in the rest of McHenry County would have ended up subsidizing this massively profitable private business (Gottemoller’s client).
Gottemoller also represented a similar unsuccessful power plant incursion attempt in the late 1990’s, and heard all the data about water use then, so he cannot claim ignorance of the fact that such clients’ narrow interests would damage every single citizen in McHenry County.
A County Board leader should have not even the temptation or possibility of such a conflict of interest in the future.
Didn’t he represent Metra when his buddies Pagano and Schaeffer were trying to give his buddy Ken Koehler a big sloppy kiss by buying his land for a 3rd train station in Crystal Lake?