Below is the McHenry County Board comparison that McHenry County Democrats prepared, but which I haven’t been able to find any delivered in District 2, which is comprised of Crystal Lake, Lakewood and Lake in the Hills.
The post card that was mailed in District 6 can be found here. If you look at it, you will see one side was intended to support the Democrats’ countywide candidates and the other its two district County Board candidates.
This piece, designed to support Democrats Monique Miller and Jim Roden, apparently was not mailed.
Dems have no support, no money, they are broke just like they are all over this State.
I see they believe that if you repeat a lie often enough, that is sufficient to brainwash the people.
On reducing the size of the Board:
We had a lot of discussions on this in a special committee that I was on.
Here are some of the issues:
(1) Right now we have representation of every part of the county on every committee. As most of the decisions are really made at the committee level where people are able to drill down on the proposals, this is an important thing to keep.
We can go to 5 or even 3 member committees now due to changes in the Open Meetings Act so you could have fewer county board districts.
The Board size would need to be a multiple of 3 or five so we could have a 15 member board, for example, plus a (non voting) Chairman.
However, this would mean that in some years you would have two votes for Board members and other years only one.
This could get confusing and may disadvantage the members who have to run by themselves, which is why it hasn’t been done I was informed.
The Democrats want to go the other way and have single member districts.
Their mantra is that this will increase accountability as people will be able to point the finger at only one person in their district.
There is some merit to that.
However, their real goal is to try to gerrymander districts like we see in Lake and Kane counties so there are safe Democrat seats.
If you do that, you will lose the full representation we now have on committees.
You would also have to wait four years instead of two if you were dissatisfied with your representation.
Kane County has a terrible system where there is a 14 member committee that decides what goes on the full Board agenda.
This leaves the members who are not on that committee out in the cold and their constituents too.
The Franks proposal to reduce the committees to an arbitrary number without considering subject matter consistency and have everyone meet all day in one marathon session is insane and will not pass, so we will be left with the current system, which works well.
(2) Reducing the size of the Board may appear to save money in the short run, but if Members are thereby assigned to attend more committee meetings they will eventually want to increase their salaries.
The Board salaries in any event are a tiny portion of a $240 Million budget and the county is only 9% of the tax bill so we are talking about fractions of pennies in terms of individual homeowner taxes. Remember the “Mill”?
I can’t see us getting down to less than 7 main committees plus a few special committees such as for capital improvement projects, and then there are the liason positions to boards and commissions.
Everyone will have to be on at least 3 to 4 committees of one sort or another some of which meet more than once a month.
If you want to save money on taxes RUN FOR YOUR LOCAL SCHOOL BOARD!
I can’t emphasize that enough!
SEVENTY PER CENT of the local property taxes are there.
Not at the county.
Petitions can be filed all of this coming week and until 4 PM on the Monday following Thanksgiving.
If you don’t do that, or at least start showing up regularly at school board meetings, stop complaining about your property taxes.
If you are not aiming at the right target, you will not hit anything.
The whole freaking system is crap.
I’m not getting why we even “need” any of this out-of-countrol legislation/legislators to do what?
Take our money for telling us when they are are going to take our money again?
What is the purpose of this whole charade?
Maybe if mayors and goverenors actually did their jobs we wouldn’t need all of these underlings pushing this way and that trying to seize control over the populace.
Good people know how to live a moral life and help each other.
They don’t need no stinking political committees to tell them what they have to do.
The whole scenario is way past out of control.
I can’t wait for the whole system to collapse on itself so that normal eople can go on with living their lives.
Then who fills the potholes Cindy?
You need something.
It’s has become the way it is because citizens no longer concern themselves with government and don’t know what they are voting for.
This makes them easily swayed by demagogues who tell them what they want to hear but then don’t deliver on their promises because their promises were undeliverable, and they knew that at the time.
About 90% of the people I talked to going door to door throughout the county didn’t even know that that County Board Chairman race would be on the ballot, and this continued right up to the week before the election.
This included people who had voted in the GOP primary and actually probably voted on the position then.
Even fewer knew what county government even was or what the Chairman of the Board was.
That made them susceptible to crazy promises.
The same happened on the national level.
Citizens need to get involved at all levels and this week is the perfect time to start that process.
Go online and get petition forms and then get out their and get some signatures.
If you don’t want to do it for yourself, help someone else.
you only need .005% of the number of people who voted for that office in the last consolidated election in 2015. Oftentimes it is less than 100.
Be sure to get at least double that number and NUMBER THE PAGES OF YOUR PETITION.
Also include the STATEMENT OF CANDIDACY and file your STATEMENT OF ECONOMIC INTERESTS and attach the receipt. STAPLE them together.
Make sure the signatures of the circulators are NOTARIZED.
There is no excuse for complacency and arm chair complaining.
Do something now or forever hold your peace.
Actually there may be excuses for complacency, Mike.
Illinois (and other states) have rules that make it difficult to be a candidate.
We have primaries for the major offices in the depth of Winter.
The elections (with primaries) last far to long for an employed person to participate in.
We ask candidates to get a large number of petition signatures (800+) for some offices, when it should be a small fee.
And then in the name of transparency, require that they fill out form after form disclosing who gave money to whom for what (Not realizing that these rules are simply set to allow the “real powers” to track how any upstart competition is running their campaign so that it can be outspent or out manuvered).
There is a reason they call it Illinois.
If you don’t fill out the paperwork “right” you are out!
Add to that the crazy political landscape (one where if you have an opinion you are beaten to death by anonymous bloggers) it is no wonder why nobody is interested in running.
Considering all of this I believe you have the recipe for unresponsive/out of control government (property taxes) and self dealing (giant pensions at ages as low as 50), which luckily we have an abundance of (because if it weren’t for watching our politicians go to jail, there would be nothing to do).
Illin
Noise
Mike? My father had a cottage between two lakes.
When the gravel road got extreme pot holes he fixed it.
He ordered the gravel and spread it hinself.
If the pepole that lived along that road wanted to help out, thry chipped in.
That is how real people take charge and help their neighbors.
People that wait for or expect their “government” (meaning of the word is mind control!)to fix everything for them – then theeir lives are hardly worth burdening the rest of us now, is it?
Stop stealing my money to fix YOUR potholes.
IF I get a pothole, will deal with it myself!!
Corrupt government controlled by the Democrats in Illinois has
amassed a debt that will not and can not be rectified in our lifetime.
People and businesses fleeing the state in record numbers with every passing year,
and they are taking their wealth with them. Who can blame them ?
Welcome to the Sanctuary State Of Illinois.
Cindy. That won’t work with the Interstate.
Most of the petitions for local offices only require a few dozen signatures.
It’s not that hard.
Get someone to review them if you aren’t sure.
I will do that free of charge.
If you don’t, stop posting here.
You are just so much hot air.
I favor single member districts, the present four per system means each member has to actually rep 52k people, way to much IMO.
20k people per single rep district member should be the standard, which would be 16 now with the possibility of more as population grows.
A computer program could be made that was not bias to divide the county into 16 districts or more, with no accounting for anything but the number of people that live in a area.
I’d agree any reduction in the numbers of members in the long run will not save anything overall, more work always means more pay.
We need the vote on tax and levy changes like Paul and Andrew are pushing, that will change the game to our benefit.
The big BLUE spot on the electoral college map looks just like the ‘zit’ that won’t go away before the prom.