Eight new Kane board members bring changes for committees

Tuesday will mark the final Kane County Board meeting for eight members as Election Day spawned one of the largest rookie classes in recent memory.

With that comes a whole new dynamic for how the county board will conduct business. It's a dynamic that largely will be set by County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay.

In 13 county board races, voters elected eight new members. That means nearly one-third of the board will be brand new. That wave of change also created three key chairman vacancies on the finance, transportation and public health committees. Those three chairmanships also carry the power of three key votes on the executive committee, which is overseen directly by McConnaughay and acts as the final filter for all decisions before they hit the full county board.

Those chairman slots will be filled by people McConnaughay will decide on in December. She will also decide to which committees the eight freshman board members are assigned.

“It's pretty much crazy season now until we get through that because everybody kind of jockeys for position for what they want to do and where they want to be,” McConnaughay said. “It's a new cast of characters. This board has really, really changed in a very short period of time. You've got a lot of new energy, a lot of new viewpoints. The trade-off is they don't have some of the institutional history or knowledge. So part of what I have to do is, to the best of my ability, pair up some of that institutional knowledge with some energy and some natural expertise in certain areas. This is a young board, experiencewise.”

McConnaughay wouldn't rule out naming a freshman county board member to a committee chairman slot. She pointed to her own place on the executive committee as a newcomer to the county board back in the early 1990s.

But with such a wave of inexperience onto the county board, McConnaughay said the public should be prepared to see the board rehash many of the arguments of the past.

“The educational process is pretty substantial and pretty steep right now,” McConnaughay said. “Just about everything will require an explanation before you move on.”

That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but the county board has been mired in myriad financial challenges and arguments in the past couple of years. McConnaughay said those arguments may also see some renewal as new board members awaken to a financial system unlike anything they've seen in the private sectors from which they come.

“One of the biggest things we'll struggle with is explaining the finances,” she said. “That is, without a doubt, the most difficult thing. It's not like if you own a business. You can't compare it to that. It's not like your personal finances. You can't compare it to that.

“And it sometimes defies logic because some legislative body decided this is how you have to do it. You have a financial process that has all kinds of caveats to it. It will take time. It takes years to really understand it.”

That may be a honeymoon period new board members can't afford. The county finished with a deficit in 2008, had a failed end-of-the-year budget solution in 2009 with furloughs for sheriff's employees and now faces a 2010 budget flirting with more red ink at the end of the year.