Term limits question knocked off Wauconda ballots

A citizen-driven proposal to create term limits for Wauconda's mayor and trustees will not appear on April 4 ballots because petition pages were numbered improperly, officials ruled Tuesday.

A three-member electoral board voted to remove the question on the ballot after a one-hour hearing at village hall.

The proposal asked residents if the mayor and trustees shall be limited to two 4-year terms, starting with those elected April 4.

The legality of the referendum was challenged by Wauconda resident Steve Diol.

Diol, represented by attorney Adam Lasker at the hearing, claimed the 27 petition pages weren't numbered sequentially as required by law.

Lasker argued the pages were numbered by the individual signature gatherers and not as one document. Several pages weren't numbered at all.

Additionally, Lasker said the petition didn't have enough signatures and didn't have consistent headers atop each page. He also alleged the wording of the question itself wasn't clear.

The electoral board - composed of Mayor Frank Bart, Village Clerk Gina Strelecki and Trustee John Barbini - agreed with Diol and Lasker on the page-numbering objection, and that was enough to declare the proposal invalid.

Mayoral candidate Bryan Anderson and trustee candidate Joe Lewis members, of the One Wauconda slate, were behind the term-limit campaign and defended the documents before the board.

Anderson accepted defeat in an interview afterward.

"It's the rules," he said. "You live by them, you die by them."

A second citizen-driven referendum for Wauconda voters wasn't challenged and will appear on April ballots.

That question asks if storyboards for the village's Heroes of Freedom Memorial should include text about the U.S. military's participation in the war on terrorism and the war in Afghanistan.

Panels that mentioned those military conflicts were removed shortly after the memorial was dedicated in September 2015 because they were put up without the village board's approval.

They have not been reinstalled or replaced, nor have village officials publicly discussed such a move.

The memorial itself - the centerpiece of which is a 7.5-ton steel beam salvaged from one of the fallen World Trade Center towers - has remained a solemn attraction in town.

Trustees blamed Bart - a military veteran who was one of the memorial's chief proponents - for putting up the storyboards without their review and consent. They insisted they objected to procedure not being followed, as opposed to the boards' content.

Bart denied having anything to do with the storyboards' installation.

Bart and Anderson were among the people who gathered signatures for the referendum concerning the memorial. So did trustee candidates Mike Silverman and Dan Casper, who are part of Anderson's One Wauconda slate.

If trustees don't object to the text of the storyboards, Anderson said, they should be reinstalled.

"Why is there a holdup?" Anderson said. "Why should it be lost in parliamentary procedure?"