Tuesday night McHenry County Board Chairman Mike Buehler delivered his first analysis of the situation in McHenry County. His speech follows:

State of the County Address

Good evening. I would like to welcome our County Board members, department heads, county elected officials, staff, and the public to my first State of the County Address as Chairman.

The County Board Chairman doesn’t normally deliver this annual address until his first full year in office.

However, I think we all can agree that these are not normal times – a year ago, we only just started understanding the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I think few of us thought it would be impacting our lives a year later.

McHenry County, like the rest of the nation and the world, endured a long and horrible year at the hands of COVID-19.

This crisis has tested each and every one of us, and has put incalculable hurt on families, businesses, social service agencies, and governments.

To date, McHenry County has lost 267 people to this disease – that’s 267 families that lost loved ones too soon, never to be the same.

Fortunately, the storm is starting to break, thanks to Operation Warp Speed.

A safe and effective vaccine was developed in record time, and more and more people are being inoculated every day.

Our metrics continue to move in the right direction.

As a result, our businesses are finally reopening, and more people are returning to work.

Our schools are returning to in-person learning.

Sports and leisure events are returning. 

However, we cannot let the sunlight peeking through the dark clouds blind us to the fact that recovery will not be a quick process.

Thousands of our constituents, many of them among our county’s most vulnerable, lost their jobs.

While many businesses have reopened, others have shut their doors permanently, their owners losing their life’s work.

As we look to the future, we cannot afford as a county to forget these people.

Local governments, which came together in an unprecedented spirit of cooperation and common cause, must ensure that those who were hit the hardest by the pandemic don’t get left behind. 

Instead of looking back, we must move forward – not just with a spirit of recovering what we’ve lost, but also with a mindset of expanding our opportunities, and doing it together.

To an extent, we have to be reactive, but not at the expense of being proactive.

That’s how we will ensure that, as we begin moving forward, we bring everyone with us.

McHenry County government was well-prepared financially for the havoc brought on by the pandemic, thanks to sound fiscal policy and years of prudent and thoughtful budgeting, none of which would have happened without our talented and dedicated staff, forward-thinking County Board members, and countywide elected officials and department heads.

McHenry County for many years has budgeted with future rainy days in mind – and when this downpour came, we were ready.

We’ve been blessed.

But many people, through no fault of their own, haven’t been as fortunate.

Their jobs stopped with the lockdown, or their hours or wages were cut, or they found themselves struggling to pay for day care when their children’s schools closed to in-person learning.

Federal and state governments have stepped in to help by passing multiple stimulus bills, extending unemployment benefits, and creating programs like the federal Paycheck Protection Program and the state Business Interruption Grant.

And we, too, chose to act, and act quickly.

Within weeks of receiving $9.1 million in stimulus money to help people who had fallen behind on their rent or utilities, we created the McHenry County Emergency Utility and Rental Assistance Program to disburse it.

Since the program went live last month, hundreds of renters and landlords have applied for assistance to keep rooves over their heads, and keep their lights on and water flowing.

However, we must not fall into the trap of focusing solely on the financial stresses our constituents are under.

We cannot – must not – overlook the tremendous toll that the pandemic has cost the mental health of our community. 

McHenry County is fortunate to be served by an outstanding safety net woven by a dedicated network of social service agencies.

They’ve always been there for us, even under stress from years of chronic late and incomplete payments from the state.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented demand for their services at the same time it has hammered their budgets and significantly curtailed their ability to raise funds.

Just look at the demand that was seen by our food pantries alone, as people who had never required food assistance before, suddenly needed help feeding their families.

Our social service agencies need our support – now more than ever.

The 2021 State of Addiction report released earlier this year offers an eye-opening read; if you have not yet read it, I suggest that you take the time to do so.

Last year, overdose deaths in McHenry County increased markedly after two years of significant decline.

Alcohol sales nationwide rose fivefold in April of last year and stayed at almost double 2019’s rate as late as October.

These agencies are on the front lines in this fight, and without backup, these numbers will get worse.

I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight a significant addition to our social safety net last year.

Despite the lockdown and all the problems that came with it, McHenry County opened its first dedicated, year-round homeless shelter.

Thanks to the hard work of county staff, the City of McHenry and Pioneer Center for Human Services – and the generosity of The Chapel for donating the space – we now have a facility to help the homeless get back on their feet, and get those requiring mental health services the help they need.

Helping our business community goes hand-in-hand with helping people by getting them back to work.

And again, McHenry County has been doing its part.

We’ve been augmenting federal and state business assistance programs with initiatives of our own.

As our improving metrics slowly but surely peeled back the mitigations put in place to slow the pandemic’s spread, we created the Immediate Business Relief Grant to distribute funding directly to qualifying businesses in the hard-hit food service, accommodation, arts, entertainment and recreation sectors.

We also created the Small Business Transformation Grant to help small businesses in low- and moderate-income areas change their business models to adjust to the new realities of the pandemic.

I’m proud to report that we assisted a total of 40 businesses through both loans, allocating more than $900,000 in direct funding.

This is on top of the $230,000 awarded last summer to 52 other businesses through the county’s Small Business Stabilization Grant Program.

Not all of our assistance was financial.

This County Board and our Planning and Development Department scoured our Code of Ordinances and our Unified Development Ordinance to remove every impediment we could to help our struggling businesses.

We

• suspended our restrictions on outdoor dining and outdoor signage, and
• allowed businesses that had paid their 2020 liquor license fees, or intended to do so, to renew for 2021 at no cost.

Similarly, our Board of Health recently reduced restaurant license costs by 50% for 2021.

It’s easy, now that we’re in Phase 4 mitigation and the end is in sight with each new vaccination, to forget that our businesses are still facing restrictions that hurt their profitability, which in turn hurts their owners, their managers, and their workers.

We must continue to think forward and think outside the box to do everything we can.

We’ve strengthened our partnerships over the past year with the Workforce Network and McHenry County College to help our businesses, and we’ve forged new ones through the new Resume McHenry County task force.

Together, we can help our business community rebound, stronger than ever before.

While we must focus on helping constituents and businesses hurt by the pandemic, we can’t afford to be solely reactive.

We also have to be proactive, and focus on growing new businesses, new jobs, and new opportunities.

This horrible pandemic will one day be a memory, and we have to keep both eyes on the prize of life beyond it.

Before COVID-19, the US economy was riding high – we enjoyed the lowest jobless rate in more than half a century – and we were starting to take advantage of it through forward-thinking initiatives and business-friendly policies. 

We can now put these ideas to work as vital components for an economic rebound. 

Months before the pandemic struck, McHenry County cut the ribbon on the full interchange at Route 23 and I-90, finally fulfilling McHenry County’s decades-old vision of having our own direct access to the interstate highway system.

It’s time for us to move forward and create opportunities to turn that interchange into a manufacturing hub with direct routes to Rockford and O’Hare airports, as well as Chicago – the hub of the entire North American rail system.

Later this year, the two-year widening of Randall Road in Lake in the Hills and Algonquin will be complete, improving traffic flow and capacity for a retail corridor that has become a vital component of McHenry County’s economic engine. 

But infrastructure is more than just roads. If there’s one thing that the pandemic taught us in this age of working from home, remote learning and increased e-commerce, it’s that we need to have a top-notch digital infrastructure as well.

Several years ago, McHenry County partnered with Woodstock School District 200, the City of Woodstock, McHenry County College and the Emergency Telephone System Board to extend high-speed fiber up Route 14 from McHenry County College to give us access to lightning-fast Internet.

With the COVID-19 funding we are set to receive under the American Rescue Plan Act, I believe the time has come to extend this network westward to the governments and schools of Harvard and Marengo to help underserved students, as well as the 23-90 interchange to further incentivize its development.

And speaking of looking west, we will continue to partner with our friends in Boone and Winnebago counties to craft the Comprehensive Economic Development Study to help our three counties steer a course to expand our economies.

The pandemic has changed a lot of the way people do things, and some of this change is going to be permanent.

But change can be a good thing.

It can provide us opportunities that will make our county a better place to live for decades to come.

COVID-19 forced us to find ways to provide the services our constituents rely on, while keeping them and our employees safe.

County Administration and department heads quickly implemented a successful work-from-home program to help prevent the spread of the disease, and worked tirelessly to acquire personal protective equipment to safeguard the employees for whom working from home was not an option.

All of our departments were tested like never before, and they rose to this tremendous challenge.

I’d like to give special recognition to the staffs of

• Valley Hi Nursing Home,
• the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office,
• our IT professionals, and, of course,
• our Department of Health and their volunteers,

for their hard work and perseverance.

Our county employees proved to be flexible and adaptable, and so did this County Board.

We held our meetings virtually, and while we have since returned to the meeting room where we belong, members have the option to keep themselves and others safe, and practice social distancing by attending remotely.

A major change that came from this pandemic was the realization that the ability to communicate directly to the people is paramount.

Communications is now prioritized as a primary function of County Administration, encompassing traditional media, social media, email, and other forums.

We’ve repurposed a position in Administration to supervise these efforts, and to coordinate them with the communications professionals in the Sheriff’s office, the Department of Health, and the Division of Transportation.

We’ve also taken the new approach of holding virtual town-hall meetings live-streamed on Facebook to give people the information they need on the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Not all of the change that has come has been as a result of the pandemic.

For starters, we have a new way of doing things on the County Board –

a way of collaboration and not confrontation.

A way of listening to one another, and a way in which the Board Chairman, the Vice Chairwoman, and the chairpeople of our standing committees work together, as partners, to get things done. 

This new County Board hit the ground running.

Within a week of the swearing-in and seating of new board members, we worked together to approve our committee memberships and fill the vacancies on our boards and commissions, a number of which had been vacant for a very long time.

Working together toward a common goal is going to be more important in the coming year than ever before.

This County Board, along with staff and the NIU Center for Governmental Studies, is in the process of forging a new Strategic Plan that will help us chart a way through these uncertain times.

I’ve been saying throughout my address that our homeowners and businesses are hurting.

They are looking to us, now more than ever before, to imagine new ways of delivering services and to find whatever savings we can, wherever we can – just like they’ve had to do.

In December, we partnered with the McHenry County Council of Governments to task Executive Director Chalen Daigle with implementing the recommendations of a study examining ways that local governments can cooperate and collaborate to provide joint services.

The COVID crisis brought county government and other local bodies, especially our municipalities and school districts, closer than ever before.

Look at how fast we worked with our school districts to get teachers and support staff vaccinated, or how the City of McHenry and the health department partnered to turn a long-vacant department store into a mass vaccination center.

It is imperative that we build on these partnerships and continue this spirit of cooperation to find the best ways to deliver services as economically as we can.

Even though McHenry County was a leader in fiscal prudence long before COVID-19, we will be taking advantage of all the state and federal help that’s out there to compensate for the tremendous costs of bearing the brunt of the county’s pandemic response.

McHenry County government will be receiving $59.7 million over two years under the American Rescue Plan Act signed into law last month.

While some of that money will be used to make us whole, I have made clear that the significant majority of it will be allocated back to the community to help as many people as we can in as deliberate and responsible a way as we can.

We are looking forward to rolling out our McHenry County Rescue Plan, which will be modeled off of the federal American Rescue Plan Act.

As proof of this county government’s years of thoughtful and forward-thinking financial management, we will be not only financially healthy in 2022, but also debt-free. [Emphasis added.]

That bears repeating – by the end of next year, McHenry County will have no debt on its books, thanks to the hard work of this County Board and staff.

Every generation faces its test.

We, as a county and as a nation, have faced world wars, depressions, craven terrorist attacks, crippling natural disasters, and other tribulations.

We survived those, and came out stronger, and so shall be the case with COVID-19.

We have met it together, we are beating it together, and we will emerge victorious together.

And we will do it the way we faced all the others – working as a team, together.

Thank you.