McHenry County Blog

Without first informing the school board or parents, the Huntley School District has filed a plan with the Special Education District of McHenry County (SEDOM) outlining how Federal Stimulus money will be spent under the Individual Development Education Act (IDEA).

You remember that the administration recommended spending only half of the $1.6 million on what most people would consider special ed purposes.

The board, with administrators present, spent two nights getting input from parents.

I detected sincerity from Board President Shawn Green when he spoke of his concerns about that diversion of money from special ed kids.

Now, without board approval–at least in an open meeting–and with an unfilled promise for a parental survey (see below for what is contained on the bottom of minutes below; click to enlarge the image), a plan for how to spend the Federal funds has been filed in Woodstock.

ARRA Funds

• A survey was passed out to attendees and will also be on the district website. Staff and parents will have the opportunity to complete the survey online. Datesto be determined.
• Outcome of the survey should be ready for the October School Board meeting.

Supt. John Burkey had District 158 file a plan with SEDOM to spend the IDEA ARRA (American Recovery Re-Investment Plan) stimulus funds without as much as telling parents about last Friday’s deadline.

It is hard to believe that school administrators didn’t knew about the deadline and would be telling parents a survey would be taken, tempting them to think they would have input on such a plan.

The district hired a new attorney, a specialist in Special Ed, who promptly told parents how trust is important.

Maybe the trust speech should have been shared more broadly.

There are so many questions

• Whose name is on the document?
• Is it Director of Special Services Cheryl Kalkirtz’?
• Was Kalkirtz following orders about what was in the submission, risking insubordination if she didn’t send in the document as instructed? Or was she the author and decision-maker behind its entire content?
• Whose idea was it to keep the plan and its submission deadline secret from the board and parents?

Board President Green assured parents they would have input into any plan.

Since the parents’ survey has not been completed, it would seem that parental input has gone by the wayside.

But, since the plan hasn’t been made public yet, who knows?  Maybe some of the verbal advice from the Special Ed Moms and Dads was followed.

Keeping key information from the public was a cornerstone of the referendum tax hike deception of 2004.

Five years later, it appears similar practices live under a new administration.

As a former government official, I can tell you that individuals act with impunity when they are certain there will be no potential negative consequences if they get caught.  (If you need a high profile example, think of Governor Rod Blagojevich before his arrest.)

It seems to me that the school board has been hung out to dry…assuming they have not been informed of the content of the report.

Certainly, if the board majority has approved what has been submitted in their names, special ed parents will wonder when and where that approval occurred.

Any approval out of public view would challenge the mandate of the Open Meetings Act.
 
So, let’s assume the Open Meetings Act was obeyed.

Who, then, has concocted this secret plan?

Will that person or persons be punished or rewarded?

There does seem to be some irony that Federal government officials can’t keep a military recommendation about the need for more troops for Afghanistan a secret, yet Huntley’s school administration thinks it can keep a spending plan secret from residents until after going through the motions of taking a survey.

It will be interesting to see to school administrators explain the getting of input after, instead of before the plan was sent to SEDOM.

It will also be interesting to see whether newspapers’ editorial staffs give District 158 a pass, not to mention how reporters will cover the story.

The local expert on stadiums is McHenry’s Steve Stanek. He is a Research Fellow with the Heartland Institute.

When I read in Kevin Craver’s article in the Northwest Herald that the McHenry County Board is thinking of awarding the largest portion of the Federal stimulus bonds to the Woodstock baseball stadium folks, I thought of Stanek and asked for his opinion.

Just in case you are interested, here is the story I wrote the night the Woodstock City Council approved the proposal.

Here’s what Stanek has to say:

“I could quote dozens of economists and public policy researchers to show how bad it would be for the County Board to grant this greedy, self-serving request for $15 million of stimulus bonds for that baseball stadium. But I will instead quote the owners of a professional sports team:

“‘The financial issue is simple, and the city’s analysts agree, there will be no net economic loss if the Sonics leave Seattle. Entertainment dollars not spent on the Sonics will be spent on Seattle’s many other sports and entertainment options. Seattleites will not reduce their entertainment budget simply because the Sonics leave,’ the Soncis said in the court brief.” — Seattle Times, Jan. 18, 2008, regarding the NBA’s Super Sonics trying to break their stadium lease to move to another city.

“Imagine: The owners of the Seattle Super Sonics said, under oath in federal court, that Seattle would suffer no economic harm if the team were to leave the city. These same owners, when arguing for huge taxpayers subsidies for KeyArena in Seattle, said the team would bring tremendous economic benefits. But of course, when they made those claims, they were not under oath in a court of law.

“When I read about this request for stimulus bonds in the (Northwest) Herald this morning, I said to myself,

‘You’d think these people would have learned from the MCC baseball stadium fiasco.’

“But then I realized this has nothing to do with good economics or benefiting the community.

“This has to do with benefiting a handful of people with lots of money and friends in high places in this county, and with making a handful of people who cast themselves as community leaders feel good about themselves.

“I am especially disgusted with the McHenry County Community Foundation. I contacted them with information about how bad it is to use subsidies to support such facilities, and I received assurances this would be entirely privately funded. (See this article.)

“Now $15 million of stimulus bonds that have been made available by the government could go to this baseball team.

“To those few local officials who might actually care about benefiting the community, I say this would be a terrible waste of resources.

“Economic studies overwhelmingly conclude sports teams return virtually nothing to the economy and sometimes actually hurt the overall economy.

“That money could be loaned far more effectively to other businesses — businesses that have been in this county for years, paying every nickel of tax local government officials can squeeze from them.

“If they don’t believe me about the overwhelming agreement among researchers about how bad such proposals are, maybe they’ll believe this:

’With most empirical issues there’s lots of debate. Does the minimum wage cause unemployment? There’s lots of debate about that issue. Here there’s no debate.’ — Vanderbilt University economist John Siegfried regarding economists against sports subsidies, quoted in Boston Globe, March 19, 2006.”

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All the photos were taken at the Woodstock City Council meeting when the proposal was approved 6-1. Top right, pointing at the plan for the stadium is Mark Houser, the man who refused to identify himself when he walked out of a secret meeting with the McHenry County College board. The MCC plan eventually died, of course. Below are Frontier League Commissioner Bill Lee and baseball team promoter Pete Heitman. The crowd that attended the Woodstock City Council meeting is seen at the bottom.

I would note that now the Democrats have two issues upon which to beat county board Republicans about the head–the upcoming Ridgefield train station vote and the baseball stadium bond vote.

Remember the

direct mail piece the Democrats put out last fall (click to enlarge) ?

I am sure the Dems will top this piece, if the county board allocates more than half of the bonds allocated for private enterprise in McHenry County to the Woodstock baseball stadium.

And think of the mailing that could be made to every small business in McHenry County:

Couldn’t get a loan last year?

The McHenry County Board could have helped you, if (you fill in the blank).

In case you have forgotten how good the “Monopoly” piece was, talk a look at

McHenry Dems Attack Republican Monopoly

Democrats Go for Republican Vulnerabilities – 1

Democrats Go for Republican Vulnerabilities – 2

Democrats Go for Republican Vulnerabilities – 3

Democrats Go for Republican Vulnerabilities – 4

County Board Plans to Buy Land to the North

Democrats Go for Republican Vulnerabilities – 5

How Is Your Town Ranked by Local Democrats?

That’s what State Rep. Lou Lang (D-Skokie) said he was going to tell McHenry County Democrats at their central committee meeting Wednesday night.

Lang is a 22-year member of the Illinois House and Mike Madigan’s floor leader.

“I’m involved in a lot of noise on the floor,” he said.

“We just got through five years of a governor who didn’t understand his job. I’m not just talking the criminal charges.”

Lang talked about the impeachment trial, observing that there had been a lot of talk about it in the back rooms for a long time.

“One who did not talk about it quietly in the back rooms was your own State Rep. Jack Franks.

“I’d prefer to have taken him out (in an election). Impeaching a governor isn’t too good for your party.

“Democrats were moving forces in cleaning up our own act, in cleaning up Springfield,” said one of the members of the House Impeachment Committee.

“While it looked like fun, it was not fun.

“This is the most important time I’ve spent in the legislature.

“Governor (Pat) Quinn takes over…at the worst possible time.

“(We are in) unprecedented fiscal crisis in the state. All fifty states (are in the same condition).”

Referring to Quinn, Lang said, “He’s been practicing for this job for a very long time. He wakes up as Lieutenant Governor and went to sleep as Governor.”

Lang praised the courage of Quinn for proposing an income tax increase.

“It took a significant amount of political courage.”

“We must do something to maintain the level of services,” was the way Lang characterized Quinn’s motivation.

Lang told how the Federal government made it impossible to use most of the stimulus money to fill the $6-11 billion budget hole. Congress wrote into the law that Medicaid payment cycles had to be lowered from Illinois’ 90-days to 30-days.

“All that was left was the human service programs.”

He pointed out that when human service agencies faced a 50% cut in subsidies that “doesn’t equal 50% of the cost because of fixed costs.”

“I voted for the income tax.”

Lang was one of 42 Democrats who voted for it.

“Jack Franks, my very good friend, didn’t vote for it. He had legitimate, thoughtful reasons.”

“Dozens who voted, ‘No,’ did so just to protect their next election.

“Jack Franks is my good friend, but at least he had a reason.

“There are so many who did not.

“We did have thirteen more people (Democrats) ready to vote for an income tax increase,” Lang added.

Doing the addition, that meant the Democrats had 55 of the needed 60 votes to pass an income tax. Lang said that those 13 saw no reason to expose themselves to political challenge, if the bill were not going to pass.

Tomorrow: “Twelve Brave Souls.”

The next day: “More About the Income Tax Fight.”

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In the photograph of the three men during the question and answer session, you see, from left to right, Mark Freund, John Darger and Jonathan Farnick

The patriotic decor of Crystal Lake’s 1776 restaurant was an ideal setting for Wednesday night’s meeting of the McHenry County Young Republicans.

It was so much more appropriate that the little room in the Pizza Hut basement outside the men’s and women’s restrooms where I remember the YR’s once met back in the 1970’s.

The main speaker was U.S. Senate candidate Ed Varga, a resident of Richmond and a ten-year member of the McHenry County Board of Health.

Varga was upbeat, having just been invited yesterday to give a five minute talk in Springfield to the Illinois Republican County Chairman’s Association at 10 today.

He previewed the speech on the YR’s.

Varga described himself as a 42 year old engineer who was a single parent of an 11-year old son who had lost his health insurance last year. His father emigrated from Europe.

He described his greatest achievement in his pubic service as

“Our leaders in Washington, D.C., have forgotten how to listen,” he continued.

“People are speaking, but people in in Washington aren’t listening.”

Varga outlined his “core values:”

• Pro-life
• 2nd Amendment supporter
• In favor of state’s rights
• Opposed to national health insurance
• Favors a strong, well-equipped military
• Opposed to cap and trade
• Supports the military’s patrolling our borders
• Opposed to devaluation of the dollar caused by the Stimulus Package
• Opposed to global environmental standards

From his hand out, I see Varga is [Mistake originally published follows: "also opposed to." Correction has been inserted following this parenthesis.] in favor of same sex unions. (Click to enlarge the image.)

After Varga’s short speech, YR President Bryan Javor announced the group now has 726 members and the goal of activating 10% of that number.

One of the on-going projects is to notify Young Republicans who live in a precinct which now had no elected GOP precinct committeeman and encourage them to run for the office.

Javor then called on heads of committees for reports.

Maybe you’ll read it here first. Increases in money to local school districts have been decided.

The information is online at the State Board of Education’s web site.

Begin the gnashing of teeth.

Or will it be sighs of relief?

Some school superintendents preferred to pretend the $160 increase per student was going to be zero.

Result?

Outlook “bleak.”

When you pretend it’s zero then you can publicly say the outlook is “bleak.”

I was at a meeting last week where the special ed parents weren’t buying into Huntley Supt. John Burkey’s desire to appropriate $800,000 of IDEA (special ed) federal stimulus funds to balance his proposed budget.

By my quick math, the foundation level increase is more than $1.25 million for Huntley School District 158.

This is a far cry from the “zero” that board members approved in the district’s preliminary budget.

And, this is not the first time a school district has predicated actions on no increase in state aid to education.

Remember the last District 300 referendum?

Now, the cat’s out of the bag.

The foundation level increase is $160 per student.

Unrealistic projections are just that.

There is nothing “fiscally conservative” about being purposely unrealistic.

The McHenry County Board is being so much more transparent that the McHenry County College Board.

When the MCC Board was trying to get public money to finance baseball promoter Pete Heitman’s team, it did not require a list of investors in the Frontier League team.

Click on the image below and you will see that the McHenry County Board is requiring that information to be made public.

So, should, per chance, the most recent iteration of Pete Heitman’s team seek public financing for its baseball stadium, you and I will get to learn who the investors are.

And, if any of the owners make campaign contributions, we eventually will be able to find out to and from whom.

Congratulations to the McHenry County Board for instituting the transparency so lacking at McHenry County College.

There is one question that it might be useful to ask which is not on the questionnaire yet:

Have any of the owners been convicted of criminal offense and, if so, what was (were) the offense(s)?

The following information about Illinois Stimulus Package projects comes from Oklahoma U.S. Senator Tom Colburn’s office:

• Illinois county to spend $173,824 weatherization grant on eight pickup trucks. Having received $400,000 for a federal weatherization program, Madison County in Illinois will be spending nearly half of it on eight new Ford F-150’s. One member of the county board, Bill Meyer, raised concerns about how fast the county is being forced to spend the money, noting that
  

  “it looks like this is being crammed down our throat.”

  Fellow council member Bruce Malone responded that they have little choice:
  

  “They are saying,
  

  ‘Get out and spend it.’” (61)

  (61) Schmidt, Sanford, “Panel calls for spending stimulus funds on weatherization,” The Telegraph, June 8, 2009.

• Road signs costing $300 each are being placed at construction sites to alert motorists that the project is being paid for by stimulus money. Signs are popping up all across American. In Illinois alone, the signs are expected to cost $150,000, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). According to an IDOT spokesman,

  
  

  “It’s difficult for us to determine how many signs there will be.”(65)

  (65) Erickson, Kurt, “Stimulus money paying for signs announcing funded projects,”

  Bloomington Pantagraph, May 12, 2009.

• Parking lot that no one wants. In Macomb, Illinois, $643,945 was spent on a Prairieview public housing parking lot that no one wants. Many of the residents that the parking lot was supposed to benefit have protested it. Explaining his concern, a local resident said,
  

  “The kids love the grass. We’ve got enough pavement here.”(72)

  (72) Steelman, Lainie, “Parking under protest at Prairieview,” Macomb Journal, June 10, 2009.

• Illinois will spend $350,000 to build a four-person bunkhouse at Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge. (75)

  The median price for a home in Marion, Illinois, the site of the park, is currently $71,000. (76)

  (75) Crab Orchard refuge gets federal stimulus money.” The Southern, April 27, 2009.

  (76) Zillow.com, search for “Marion, Illinois,” accessed June 12, 2009.

• Rather than help welfare recipients obtain jobs and escape poverty, $1 million will be used to study whether 300 people in Chicago are healthier when living in “green” public housing facilities. The study will evaluate whether building green housing is healthier for people and will focus on 300 residents at a Chicago public housing facility. Researchers expect to find that residents living in these more energy-efficient facilities will have much lower healthcare costs. This study will create interviewing jobs.(80)

  (80) Sachs, Peter, “UIC gets $1M grant to study ‘green’ housing,” Chi-Town Daily News, May 08, 2009.

If you would like to learn more, here is Senator Colburn’s publication.

Other Midwestern examples can be found here.

I wonder if the four-person Crab Orchard bunk house will turn out to be a vacation getaway for the political class, as some state DNR facilities were for Illinois politicians. Goose and duck hunting were the draw for the relatively luxurious state-owned facilities.

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Thanks for Respuublica for pointing the way to this story.

Thanks to the Northwest Herald for assigning Kevin Craver to cover the county board.

He writes today of the Finance Committee’s recommendation that the McHenry County Board vote to borrow $60 million on the Federal “come.”

All members voted to give themselves power to spend the $60 million.

Marc Munaretto is chairman of the Finance Committee, Lyn Orphal is vice chairman and the following are members:

Scott Breeden, John Hammerand, Tina Hill, Daniel P. Ryan, Mary Donner

Former McHenry County College Board member and bond counsel Tim Stratton told the committee that they is going to be “wide availability.”

President Barack Obama’s stimulus package is providing a stream of income (from borrowed billions need not be noted).

Guess the banks that got the billions still aren’t loaning to small business folks. I talked to a couple of CitiBank clients who had had their lines of credit cut, which would lead one to believe that the President’s plan is not working to these businessmen’s satisfaction.

First, McHenry County is going to become a “recovery zone.”

The county board just needs to pass a resolution.

The bonds will be highly taxed favored, won’t be counted against the county’s debt limit and, hey, we county taxpayers don’t have to worry if anyone defaults.

And, we Federal taxpayers, well, this is the year to switch your 401(k) retirement savings into a Roth IRA. (Of course, you’ll have to pay taxes on the money, but the tax rate has to be higher than it will be after the Democrats and President hike them to pay back the trillions they are borrowing.)

If you haven’t figured out I think this is a bad idea, you might want to read

The $60 million has to be out the door by the end of next year.

Although the Finance Committee will screen the public and business applicants, Munaretto said,

Maybe, but the committee surely sounds like the bankers who will make the decisions.

I hope they put in the contracts that no recipient, their officers or straw man or woman is allowed to make campaign contributions to themselves or anyone they hint could “use some help.”

The McHenry County Mental Health Board and the McHenry County Economic Development Corporation appeared in support of borrowing the money.

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Click to enlarge the 1934 Chicago Tribune cartoon.

I’m not even going to read the Northwest Herald article before posting this.

It’s front page headline tells much too much:

This is so wrong on so many levels.

First, the borrowing authorized and unauthorized by Congress (remember the Federal Reserve) is going to cause rampant inflation unless I miss my bet. That’s the usual result of running the printing presses at the U.S. Mint.

Now, the McHenry County Board is thinking about borrowing money with the expectation that the big sugar daddy in Washington will continue sending sugar plums to his children in all 3,000 counties.

And the McHenry County Board is going to play sugar daddy to business and local governments.

Sounds like a lot of opportunities for campaign fund solicitation there.

Perhaps a look at this 2006 article about example of the business judgment of the McHenry County Board might be instructive:

The result:

The State’s Attorney’s Office advised the county board to write off $177, 470 of the $200,000 loaned to Contempos Industries after the election.

Don’t recognize that name? How about Woodstock Gardens, 455 Borden Street, Woodstock (near the Illinois National Reserve Armory)?

Significantly, the recommendation came after the fall election. Democratic Party county board candidates didn’t figure out this fiasco in time to attack Republicans’ bad judgment

Oh, well.

The money didn’t come from county taxpayers anyway.

It was recycled State of Illinois dollars. We know we didn’t pay any of that.

And, who could forget the multimillion loan to the Northwest Herald at sub-market rates?

I filed a Freedom of Information request for the details a couple of years and got nothing. Guess it’s time to try again.

In any event, the NW Herald was not an “in extremis” condition then. The excuse for loaning the money was to keep the county newspaper from moving out of the county.

The real reason was to put the paper in the back pocket of the Republican Party. (Anyone want to deny the strategy worked?)

One sign on Route 176 east of the intersection of Route 31 was not enough to announce the routine repaving of Route 176 from 31 to the Fox River.

I say “routine” because the repaving would have been done whether or not the stimulus package was passed in Washington. That it is financed by Federal, rather than state funds is all that is new about the project.

There is one northbound on Route 31 just before the intersection.

There is one southbound on Route 31 just before the intersection.

There is one on the least used road at the five-way intersection, Terra Cotta.

These three are in addition to the one I reported on yesterday, which is on Route 176 going east.