Who wants to shake up the county board?
Three days after my final college class, I landed my first “real job, reporter for the now-shuttered Daily Journal. I'd somehow fallen into the premier beat coverage of the DuPage County Board.
This reporter was so new and naive that when I showed up to cover some committee meeting that Monday morning, I sat at the long, glass-topped table with the high-backed chairs. Breach of protocol, pointed out the first county member to show up; reporters sit in the more pedestrian chairs lining the walls.
Something else was lost on me at the time: There were three Democrats on the county board in 1977. Their election was the result of what many called the post-Nixon/Watergate backlash. After their time in office ended, the county board was virtually bereft of Democrats until two years ago when three more Democrats were elected on what many viewed as Barack Obama's coattails.
It would be easy to presume that nothing's changed in those 33 years. I'd beg to differ. Back in the Democrats' salad days of the '80s and '90s, they often had difficulty fielding candidates. And, even then, the quality was lacking in many instances. “Warm bodies filling a spot on the ballot" was a term used by one somewhat cynical editor (not me).
Today, most ballot positions in DuPage have candidates from both major parties. And as someone who has conducted endorsement interviews with our candidates for the past 20 years or so, I can tell you the quality of the Democratic candidates is moving upward.
It's a fact, as Dan Cronin, GOP nominee for county board chairman, put it, that some people will vote for him simply because he's a Republican.
And while there have been noteworthy shifts in how DuPage votes at the top of the ticket, that largely hasn't filtered down to the masses at the county and state legislative level. So, with an anti-Democratic backlash predicted in the Nov. 2 election, it would seem Cronin's opponent, Carole Cheney, is a long shot. But both candidates tended to downplay party labels this week when they discussed their qualifications for office with county reporter Jake Griffin and me. Other members of our reporting staff and I also interviewed candidates this week for three of the county board's six districts.
An interesting thing happened: In the county board interviews, the Democrats were feisty, challenging the GOP's long-running lock on county government, calling it a good ol' boys club full of lawyers. And men. Only three women serve on the 18-member board.
Quite the opposite occurred during the interview with Cheney and Cronin, vying to succeed Bob Schillerstrom, who has held the office for the past 12 years. If you didn't know better, you'd suspect Cheney was the incumbent knowledgeable and supportive of many county initiatives, such as its recently approved $70 million borrowing plan aimed mostly at improving the county's aging infrastructure. Republican Cronin was the feistier of the two, looking like the guy ready to shake things up a bit on the predominantly GOP board. He opposes the borrowing plan, saying people have “had it with government building up debt. He also criticized the county's revenue forecasts as being overly optimistic.
In all, though, it was an engaging, respectful 70-minute discussion of the issues. The lone bit of contention came when Cheney suggested Cronin was trying to renege on a promise not to push for a county takeover of the embattled DuPage Water Commission. Cronin fired back that he never made such a pledge, that the deal brokered in Springfield was only a first step.
If you want to see that, and other quick highlights of the session, please see the video we'll be posting on dailyherald.com in the next week or two. We'll also be covering these races old-fashioned way: With stories in our newspaper.
jdavis@dailyherald.com