McHenry County Blog

Boone County Courthouse

Springfield’s State Journal-Register is running a story about the Circuit Courts in Winnebago Counties allowing cameras in their courtrooms.

Winnebago County Courthouse

Think Belvidere.

Think Rockford.

The order will be issued on Monday.

Associated Press reports that Boone and Winnebago will make 13 counties where local judges allow photo taking and videoing.

The Tax Foundation has some remarkable work comparing property tax burdens across the United States.

Want to know what part of the country to look at for retirement, if cutting your property taxes is one of your goals?

Take a look at this map:

The Tax Foundation map comparing property taxes.

I did my best to extract the information for the top Illinois counties from one of The Tax Foundation’s searchable data bases.

The information below is from here.

Click to enlarge.

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Photoshopping by one Heck of a Guy blogster Allan Showalter.

Yesterday I wrote about how Winnebago County’s board had decided they, as part-time employees didn’t deserve to have pensions.

Front page of the Chicago Tribune April 10, 2010.

Today, the Sunday Chicago Tribune has a front page article by Christy Gutowski, Joe Mahr and Joseph Ryan entitled,

Quite a deal

Former DuPage County official Bill Maio was able to

secure a $100,000 a-year pension

after working mostly part-time

I wrote yesterday of how it used to be and to some extent still is the number of years one have of government pension credits, plus the final salary that counted, that a McHenry County Board member could take the credits from the relatively lowly paid County Board post, get elected to a countywide office which now, astoundingly, pay $100,000 a year and, then, retire after 40 years total annual pension participation at 75% of final pay under the well-funded Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF).

(I also pointed out my generous legislative pension in yesterday’s article.)

The Tribune article reminds me of a gambit that elected county officials convinced legislators to pass when I was in office to turn county officials into state legislators, as far as pension benefits went.

It’s called the “Elected County Officials” option.

Notice that to be eligible one has to be a politician.

Among retired DuPage County Officials who benefited from the special pension plan was former State's Attorney Joe Birkett. After resigning his post, he was apppointed to the 2nd Appellate Court. Click to enlarge

The request of legislators was to allow elected county officials to retire after 20 years at 80% of final salary.

That’s pretty close to the benefits legislators themselves had.

But, legislators are nervous folk.

If you can keep your county officials happy, maybe they won’t run against you.

Congressmen figured this out when they allowed state legislators to keep any expense money paid for being at state capitols tax free…whether or not it was spent on room and board.

Since some lobbying group or another is holding a reception with decent food virtually every session night, it’s not hard to spend the entire per diem payment. Former State Senator Jack Schaffer used to suggest that such money should not be paid unless it was spent.

But, back to the “Elected County Officials” pension plan.

The Tribune’s research says the bill passed overwhelmingly.

The Senate voted for it 55-2 n May 16, 1997.  Senator Dick Klemm of McHenry County supported the measure.  One of two senators who did not was Chris Lauzen from just south of the McHenry County border.

The Senate's May 16, 1997, vote on the county officials pension improvement bill.

The House, 105-10. (I voted against the bill, as you can see from the roll call below.  Ann Hughes, the other representative from McHenry County favored the bill.)

The May 23, 1997, House roll call on the county officials pension sweetener bill.

Governor Jim Edgar signed the bill.

As the arrangement went down, county officials would have ther pension payment increased from 4.5% of salary to 7.5%.

Local property taxpayers would pick up the rest.

The Tribune reports that more than half of Illinois county boards signed up for the benefit.

McHenry, Kane and Lake were not among them, but DuPage and Will Counties were.

So, think back to who was serving you on the McHenry County Board in the mid-1990′s and thank them for their good judgment, even though some countywide officials wanted the board to approve the plan so their pensions would increase a lot.

The ten largest counties in Illinois.

Used to be that Rockford’s Winnebago County was a big brother to McHenry County.

No more.

Winnebago County’s official population is now 295,266.

McHenry’s is now 308,760.

That’s an increase of 18.7% over 2000′s 260,077.

From the over 200,000 person lead that Kane County has over McHenry County, it does not appear that local officials will have bragging rights about being “Number 5″ for a long, long time…if ever.

Some really interesting information pops up in comments sometimes.

The one below is found under my weekend article about large county jails in which information about those who are incarcerated can be found on the internet. That information is not available on McHenry County Jail prisoners.

The Winnebago County Sheriff has this picture on his jail on his web site.

The following is from a person who commented as “Winnebago County Jailhouse Blues” about conditions at that that new facility, financed by a law enforcement sales tax passed in 2002:

They treat the inmates very inhumane, in ways people wouldn’t treat a wild animal. My son has been incarcerated for the past month awaiting trial.

He was put in jail because when his girlfriend gets angry, she calls the police and lies just to punish my son. I have heard so many of the same stories from other people too.

My view on the new jail is not good. I believe they are arresting people for very petty things and taking them away from their families, causing them to loose their jobs out of nothing but greed.

They need to keep that new huge jail full somehow. We all know that the crime rate here is not worse than Chicago and the only thing that makes it look like that, is because of all the unnecessary arrests made here.

Sheriff Meyers wants to purchase kiosk system machines so the inmates can get their own commissaries with out a jailer handing them out. The jail processed about $540,000 worth of commissary purchases in 2009, with more than $190,000 of profit made off of the inflated price they charge the inmates.

They admit that they made over $190,000.00 on commissions in just one year, let that money buy those machines. I don’t want to hear that they have to raise taxes again to pay for the kiosk systems.

The food portions in the jail are not enough to get full and I hear are worse than dog food. I would hope that we wouldn’t treat a dog this way and I cant understand why they think its OK to treat a human this way.

For example, the jail charges $1.00 for one bag of Ramon noodles, They actually cost 10 cents in the store. That’s a hefty profit. The inmates only buy that junk because they are still hungry after they are fed the dog food. They don’t get a plastic bowl or spoon either. They get the bag of noodles, they have to carefully open the side, fill the bag with hot tap water and wait a half hour before the noodles are soft enough to drink from the bag by then its good and cold.

I wouldn’t feed my dog like that.

Other states actually feed their prisoners enough food to get full and guess what? There is less violence in those jails too. Common sense only tells you that.

Another way they make money off the inmates is from commissions from the highly inflated cost of collect phone calls the inmates and their families pay for.

Do you know Illinois jails made almost $6,000,000.00 last year on phone commissions alone?. The high phone costs does nothing but hurt families and the children that want to speak to a parent or talk to a dieing friend, but cant afford to because the cost is so inflated.

Other states don’t charge enormous amounts of money for phone calls or food and they realize that keeping in touch with their families only helps the inmate get back into the world in a positive way. This state does everything it can to hinder anything positive. In this broke economy we need stop wasting tax dollars by putting people in jail on petty things. Check out illinoistelephonejustice.com

Inmates have the right to medical care, yet my son slipped and fell and hurt his leg that he crushed 3 weeks ago. He has requested to see a doctor and I have called to get him seen, yet after 3 weeks he still has not been seen.

He is in an enormous amount of pain and all he gets is an aspirin? This is cruel and inhumane.

That jail needs to be shut down or ran by people that know constitutional rights. We wouldn’t let an animal live in pain yet they are purposely letting my son live in pain.

He needs a cast and crutches, yet he is expected to walk on his broken leg with no pain medicine everyday. These people that run that jail have no business running it. The jailers are rude and nasty, yet they expect respect. How can anyone respect anyone who is cruel, rude and inhumane?

I hope that people start speaking up and tell the world how the Winnebago county jail truly is. They need to be exposed for their ugliness.

It’s shift change so the inmates are in their cells at the McHenry County Jail.

Update of June 15, 2012.

There is now a way to find people in the McHenry County Jail.  Look here for the link.

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A friend of McHenry County Blog was trying to find out if someone was incarcerated in the McHenry County Jail.

There was nothing on the internet, as there is for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

If someone is in state prison, you look for the “inmate locator” portion of the web site, type in a last name and everyone behind bars with that name pops up.

It must be a pretty popular question, because it’s the top Google item for IDOC and there’s even a separate listing.

But, there’s nothing like that for McHenry County.

I looked at other big counties and here’s what I found.

Lake County has a “prisoner locator” place.

Kane County has one.

DuPage County makes it easy to local those in jail.

Same with Cook County.

Winnebago County even has one and it’s smaller than McHenry County.

Populations of largest Illinois counties.

But not McHenry County, even though we are the sixth largest county in Illinois.  No county outside of the Chicago metropolitan area is larger.

I decided to look south of I-80.

The first county I checked was Sangamon, where Springfield sits. It has no easy way to find out who is in jail. The last census showed it smaller than McHenry.

Next I tried Madison County, near St. Louis. Nothing there, but Madison has about 50,000 fewer people now than McHenry. It used to be larger, but McHenry County has really grown.

Onto its neighbor, St. Clair County. Couldn’t find anything there either.  St. Clair has about as many people as Madison.

Couldn’t find any way to find an inmate in the Peoria County Jail, but that county is now much smaller than McHenry.

So, it looks as if bigger counties have prison locator functions that can be accessed through the internet, but smaller ones don’t.

I thought McHenry County was considered one of the bigger counties now, so I filed this Freedom of Information request:

“Most of the large counties in Illinois have an Inmate Search function.  Under the Freedom of Information Act, I request any documents that exist concerning McHenry County’s developing such a service to the public.”

Here is the reply I received from the Sheriff’s Department:

“The McHenry County Sheriff’s Corrections Division does not have any documents concerning the development of this service.”

Joe Wiegard did reach the top of this mountain on the Applachian Trail

With nine counties having voted on the two candidates for Congressman Don Manzullo’s 16th District state party post, State Senator Dave Syverson has come out on top.

That’s what I read between the lines of the following email that just arrived from challenger Joe Wiegand.

And, even though he doesn’t know the final results, that’s what he told me:

“I have enough information to know I lost.

“While I won overwhelmingly in Stephenson, Carroll and DeKalb Counties, I lost Winnebago by 14 raw votes on the ballot of elected committeemen (which is Syverson’s home county) at which point Chairman Jan Klaas kept her pledge to vote vacant precincts on behalf of the winner of the raw vote.”

I was asked last night at the McHenry County Republican Party Convention whether Wiegand supported Senate Bill 600, the legislation that would allow voters to again directly elect their state central committeeman.

The 2010 McHenry County Republican Party Convention

I said I didn’t know, but, that, if direct election were in effect, Wiegand would have no chance to win. Syverson has such a higher name identification in the Rockford media market, which covers most of the 16th District, Syverson would win walking away.

So, if direct election were in effect, most of them would end up being elected officials.

From the email below, you can see that Wiegand does favor direct election of the party office.

I’ve lived under both systems and, frankly, I don’t think it makes any difference.

In my experience, the Illinois Republican State Central Committee has only been useful when Governor Jim Edgar got them to mail absentee ballot applications to all GOP voters in the state and another mailing urging people to vote.  I found it useful because it contained my name as a candidate for state representative.

Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill was right:

“All politics is local.”

There is not much some state organization can do to energize a local party, if the local party isn’t interested in recruiting new people.

That’s the problem I’ve seen since I got active in 1966, when I ran for McHenry County Treasurer.

Let me give you an example.

There were four Republican Women’s Clubs then.  At the congressional district level, there was the 12th District Republican Women’s Club that Congressman Robert McClory shepherded.  Crystal Lake’s Margaret Jenner was big in that.

Then, there was the one my mother was active in—the Algonquin Township Republican Women’s Club. That’s where McHenry County Recorder of Deeds Phyllis Walters got her start.

McHenry Township had a Republican Women’s Club in which Boots Davis was active.  So, did Dorr Township.  My predecessor and successor as County Treasurer Audrey Walgenbach introduced me to it.

They have disappeared to be replaced by one McHenry County Republican Women’s Club.  I recognize all the officers’ names but one and they all are long-time party activists.

But, back to Wiegand’s email. It is below:

Joe Wiegand

I want to thank the elected Republican precinct committeemen throughout the nine northwestern counties of Illinois for their votes for me last night in the contest for 16th Congressional District State Central Committeeman.The battle within the Illinois Republican Party continues between those who would renew our commitment to the Lincoln/Reagan standards and those who have been at the helm during our days of scandal and failure.

Illinois Democrats elect their state party leadership in their primary election.

Illinois Republicans use a system that is a mixture of backroom politics and kabuki theatre, using county conventions and a convoluted set of bylaws and procedures, often, in the view of some legal scholars, in violation of Illinois state statutes.

My experience as a candidate informs me that the need for Illinois Republican Primary voters to directly elect their state party leaders is necessary for our future prosperity.  The need for passage of Senate Bill 600, which would return control of the party back to the voters, is paramount.

I guarantee you that the nine county conventions in the 16th district were held in nine different ways.

One hour before the beginning of a western county convention, I was still explaining the convoluted system to a soon to be elected chairman who did not understand the process.

When I attended the county convention of the district’s largest county (Winnebago), several newly elected committeemen had no idea what the state central committeeman’s post was nor how this election would take place.  Despite my being in attendance, rules were adopted to prohibit me from making a two minute speech to the committeemen as a candidate for the office for which they were about to vote.

As long as we elect our state central committee in the manner conducted last night, as long as public employees, tax eaters and hangers-on have the votes that are denied to grassroots Republican citizens, the Party of Lincoln and Reagan will continue to be the Party of George Ryan, Stuart Levine, Robert Kjellander and Bill Cellini, and the people of Illinois will suffer for it.  We need Senate Bill 600.

Finally, one idea I shared in my campaign was that the birthplace and cradle of Ronald Reagan should be a bevy of Republican Party building activity in the months ahead as we prepare to celebrate his 100th birthday on February 6, 2011.

Were I your state central committeeman, I would have made sure that the counties of the 14th, 16th and 17th Congressional Districts used this event to build the party, attract regional and national exposure and host an event or series of events bringing the GOP’s brightest lights to the region that bred the man who changed the world.

I ask the elected state central committeemen, the county chairmen and the precinct committeemen to give some leadership to this effort.

We live to fight another day.

Joe Wiegand

Channel 39, Fox TV in Rockford, has this story about a public hearing on Winnebago County Board member Randy Olson’s proposal to have the county sheriff deputize citizens so they can use handguns to protect themselves.

175 people packed the Veterans Memorial Hall.

You can read details of the proposal in this article:

The television station reported that most attending favored the measure.

Since so few women stand up to be counted on their desire to be able to protect themselves from raper/muggers, one who did got interviewed.

State Rep. Dave Winters said it would send a message to Springfield.

The reporter said three out of four Democrats support the proposal.

Former Democratic Party Chairman Doug Aurand joined Olson in making the proposal.

Channel 39, Fox TV in Rockford, has this story about a public hearing on Winnebago County Board member Randy Olson’s proposal to have the county sheriff deputize citizens so they can use handguns to protect themselves.

175 people packed the Veterans Memorial Hall.

You can read details of the proposal in this article:

The television station reported that most attending favored the measure.

Since so few women stand up to be counted on their desire to be able to protect themselves from raper/muggers, one who did got interviewed.

State Rep. Dave Winters said it would send a message to Springfield.

The reporter said three out of four Democrats support the proposal.

Former Democratic Party Chairman Doug Aurand joined Olson in making the proposal.

The McHenry County Board joined 70-some other Illinois counties in passing a resolution opposed to more gun control legislation.

In doing so, it broke new ground in the Chicago metropolitan area. It’s probably explained by McHenry County’s being the most rural of the six Chicagoland counties.

Winnebago County Board member Randy Olson wants his Rockford-area county to do more.

He and former Democratic Party County Treasurer and now county board member Doug Aurand want their county board to pass a resolution that allow his county sheriff to issue permits to citizens which would allow them to protect themselves with guns.

“We’re basing this on the power of the sheriff,” Randy Olson told me.

Both Democrat and Republican believe Sheriff Dick Meyers already has the power to issue such permits.

Rockford Register-Star reporter Chris Green describes the proposed rules like this: before the sheriff issues a permit such as:

being at least 21 years of age, a resident of the county for at least six months, passing a criminal-background check, completing a firearm safety training course and not having a history of mental illness or violent behavior.

You can read the details Olson sent me here.

Winnebago County first deputy state’s attorney Gary Kovanda told the reporter that such protection was limited to sworn law enforcement officers, “private security guards, state’s attorney investigators and things like that.”

Others, the article states, can be charged with unlawful use of weapons if they are found to be carrying or possessing” a weapon on or about his person on a public street, alley, or other public lands within the corporate limits of a city, village or incorporated town.”

Sheriff Dick Meyers doesn’t seem to be too delighted with the possibility either.