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Voters, look in mirror for mess at COD

The voters in DuPage County have no one to blame but themselves for the embarrassing mess at the College of DuPage. Citizens must pay attention to every election, every year. Appallingly low voter turnout by low information voters led to this deadlocked situation on the board.

Before the spring 2015 elections, the votes on the board of trustees were consistently 6-1, with Kathy Hamilton, first elected in 2013, the lone dissenter among trustees with considerably more board experience. Hamilton hated President Breuder and wanted him fired. Obviously, the previous board was advised by legal counsel that they had no cause to fire him, so they negotiated a $764,000 buyout with Breuder, which amounted to half of his remaining contract and would have seen the end of his tenure three months from now in March 2016.

Instead, the post-election Kathy Hamilton led majority dismissed the previous legal counsel, fired Breuder and two financial directors, spent $3.5 million on new legal counsel and financial consultants, leading to three lawsuits against COD, sure to cost further millions. The Higher Learning Commission put COD on probation partially because of the current board's dysfunction. The previous board functioned just as it should have.

With the resignation of the Clean Slate's brain, there is no longer a majority or a minority faction on the COD Board of Trustees. The first order of business is to appoint a seventh, neutral, true swing vote trustee. The first compromise out of a deadlocked board should be to call an organizational meeting and elect co-chairs, who will work out agendas together. On a board forced to compromise, paraphrasing Mick Jagger, they won't always get what they want, but we'll get what we need.

Diane Niesman

Wheaton

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