Lauzen waltzes to easy victory in Kane County Chairman race

Ken Shepro's decision to co-host an Election Night party with the Kane County coroner proved fateful Tuesday night. Shepro's efforts to end fellow Republican Chris Lauzen's reign as Kane County Board chairman died shortly after the polls closed.

Unofficial results showed Lauzen beating Shepro by 24,829 votes with all 291 precincts reporting. The gap represented Lauzen receiving about 74 percent of the ballots cast. Lauzen received 38,140 votes compared to 13,311 votes for Shepro.

In the postmortem, Lauzen said he won because he ran on the accomplishments of his first three years in office.

"I appreciate the landslide support," Lauzen said. "We had a positive message about past accomplishments, county board teamwork and future goals. It was strongly preferred over the negative, false accusations and dirty campaigning by my opponent."

Shepro could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

During the campaign, he accused Lauzen of hypocrisy for accepting campaign contributions for people who do business with the county. Shepro also said the ongoing property tax freeze will eventually take a toll on county services, especially if lawmakers don't at least account for new construction growth in the tax base. But none of that seemed to resonate with local Republicans Tuesday night.

Lauzen said the clear outcome of the race will hopefully send a message to the rest of the local GOP that it's time to put old grudges to rest.

"We're going to move forward and continue doing our very best on maintaining the property tax levy freeze," Lauzen said. "Our team has some exciting ideas about how to deliver on that freeze promise."

In addition to some new nontax revenue ideas, the county board has banked more than $24 million in surplus income the past three years to help keep the freeze in place as long as possible.