Clarendon Hills Trustee withdraws from Mayoral race…

We will be back. Leave us your phone number if you want advanced notice so you can watch us in action at the village board meeting.

Section Sec. 3.1-10-5(b) of the Illinois Municipal Code equates being in arrears of a debt to a municipality as having the same effect as any infamous crime, bribery, perjury, or other felony on a persons right to hold office. THAT is how important the Legislature thought it to be.

Don’t like it? Ask you Legislator to introduce a bill to change it.

Just so that you are aware, you are defending the actions of someone that violated the Illinois Municipal Code and disqualified himself for office. The legislature must have thought being in debt to be worthy of ouster from office or they would have never put it in the Municipal Code. As a matter of fact, there are several reasons an office becomes vacant, one of them is failure to qualify, another is committing a felony, and a third is election declared void. Under failure to qualify is the part that says:

(b-5) A person is not eligible to hold a municipal office, if that person is, at any time during the term of office, in arrears in the payment of a tax or other indebtedness due to the municipality or has been convicted in any court located in the United States of any infamous crime, bribery, perjury, or other felony.

The legislature must have meant what they said since they included “at any time during the term of office” in that paragraph.

So while you are pointing out reasons unqualified people hold elective office, you are at the same time defending an unqualified person.

Go figure…

Intelligent, qualified people will take it upon themselves to get involved and change the laws if they dont like them, not run and hide. And for the record, we never asked anyone to resign. We simply asked that they follow the law. One did and we congratulate him for it. The other did not and everyone is OK with him not following the law? This was no targeted political attack. It was an exposure of the law to those who are not following it and its not the first time we have done it. There are many laws I dont agree with and we have tried our best to get them changed. Some of them we have succeeded, other not.

The great part about Clarendon Hills is that we as a community vet and choose our candidates before our elections. We have a 70 year old caucus system that works very well and allows the citizens of our town to volunteer, solicit, and ultimately choose who we want to run for office. Ed Reid was that candidate. The caucus is composed of volunteers from our community, as is our entire government. To imply that two or three late water bills is somehow corruption is ridiculous, and, had you bothered to attend the village meeting last week, you would have heard the overwhelming reaction of the citizens of our community. That reaction was to support Mr. Reid’s ultimate decision to withdraw from the race– not because anyone thought that there was any malfeasance, but because he didn’t want to put up with the level of petty, childish politics that outsiders dragged into our village. It was also to condemn and call out the individuals who decided to play dirty politics in our village.

I will be the first person to admit that Illinois politics is frequently filled with corruption and greed. Watchdog groups are often healthy, necessary entities to have to protect the average citizen and make sure that our voices are heard equally. The problem with your tactics is that you have deprived a large group of citizens in our village of the candidate that we chose, with no time to find a replacement. I hate to imply that your timing was intentional, but it seems a bit too convenient that you presented your greviances right when a new candidate couldn’t be slated.

I know you will argue that Mr. Reid could have chosen to stay in the race and stick it out, but the truth is that we live in a small town of 7000 or so very closely knit people. We self-govern through a purely volunteer effort, and asking a member of our community to subject himself or herself to petty attacks from people who have quite literally NOTHING to do with us is frankly absurd. Having your dirty laundry aired before your friends and neighbors for the privilege of volunteering your time to be regularly attacked and sued by bored people with nothing better to do is the job of a masochist.

If you’re so determined to become involved in the governance of our community, come to a caucus meeting and present your findings. Let the citizens of this community vote on whether accidentally transcribing some numbers on the water bill or forgetting to drop a check by the village hall (because we didn’t have the ability to pay by credit card until last year) a few times over the course of a decade-and-a-half is a big deal. We’ve been successfully governing ourselves for a pretty long time, and we tend to know what we do and don’t accept from our “politicians”. So next time you want to get involved with matters “upstate” why don’t you do us all a favor and do it the upstanding, moral way- not snuck in the backdoor at the eleventh hour. Underhanded tactics and sneak attacks make me wonder if perhaps the watchdog group needs a watchdog group themselves.