Fire protection district leader: It's a year to take action

It didn't take long for Ed Malek to come to mind last year when Kane County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay was looking for someone new to lead the St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District.

Malek, an attorney and former Campton Township supervisor, had a reputation for building political consensus and fostering the kind of community involvement McConnaughay thought the relatively unknown taxing body desperately needed.

"The fire district had struggled with a number of issues, and it appeared to me that the residents needed to be more involved," McConnaughay says a year later. "To me, Ed Malek was the guy for that job."

Malek accepted the volunteer appointment to the district board of trustees last January and was quickly voted in as president, replacing Chuck Reed, who had resigned. Then he got down to business.

One of Malek's first moves was postponing talks of a hefty tax-hike referendum, viewed by many as symbolic of his willingness to recognize opposition from taxpayers. Malek also proposed a moratorium on a controversial sprinkler ordinance that had entangled the district in litigation, and he led the expansion of the board from three members to five.

Perhaps lauded most of all, however, was the citizen group Malek helped organize to advise the board in nearly all of its decisions. The move earned Malek the trust, and eventually, the admiration of some of the district's staunchest critics.

"Instead of trying to push things through and ramrod things through, he talks to people. He listens to people and hears what their concerns are," said Chuck Dunham, who rallied against a failed tax-hike request to build fire stations in 2006 and was later appointed to serve on the board of trustees. "The sheer fact that he was willing to have some people who were in vocal opposition on the board says a whole lot about how he includes people."

Malek says government shouldn't operate any other way.

"A lot of people can get elected," he says. "But that's not the question. The question is how do you do the best job."

For Malek, holding an elected or appointed office is merely an opportunity to be a distiller of public opinion, a conduit for public discussion.

That philosophy seems to live on in Campton Township government, where Malek was town supervisor from 1993 to 2001.

His influence continues in the committees he helped form years ago, and the easy-going feel of Campton Township board meetings, where citizens are encouraged to raise their hands and participate in the discussion.

Malek says he hopes to take the fire district, which serves unincorporated St. Charles, Wayne and Campton Hills, into similar territory. After all, the fire district faces some of the same challenges -- poor public awareness, a residential housing boom and budget constraints -- the township did 15 years ago.

In the coming year, he and the expanded board have planned a series of public meetings to dig into tough issues, namely taxes and how trustees conduct business.

"I want to make this a more professionally run district," Malek, 54, says. "It's our year to move forward, our year to take action."

Malek describes himself politically as "fiscally conservative but from a moderate social basis."

He became interested in politics and law after the Kent State shootings in 1970, when tensions between protesters of the American invasion of Cambodia and the Ohio National Guard mounted tragically, resulting in the shooting deaths of four students.

To Malek, the event spoke volumes about what can happen when communication between a government and its people breaks down.

"I said to myself, 'There's got to be a better way to effectuate change,'" he says.

Having grown up on Chicago's Northwest side, where his father was a factory worker, Malek set out after high school to earn a law degree. In 1975, he graduated from Loyola University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in political science. He then moved on to The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, where he met his future wife, Nancy, and received a law degree in 1978.

Malek first entered the public spotlight as a private-practice attorney in the late 1980s, when he represented opponents of a proposed supercollider at Fermilab. He argued his clients were blindsided by the proposal -- which never came to be -- after officials did most of their decision making out of public view. The case was eventually dismissed, but not before prompting sweeping changes to public hearing rules in Illinois.

Another big case, Malek says, was one involving the Department of Natural Resources, which was accused of withholding public documents from taxpayers: "That really infused my political career because we saw how government worked."

But Malek's largest battle against status quo didn't come until 1993. That was when he and a slate of grassroots candidates overthrew the Campton Township board by forcing a Republican caucus.

Reminiscent of his other confrontations, Malek's slate was fed up with a town board that "talked but never did anything" and took matters into their own hands. Among the slate was Neal Anderson, a local farmer whom Malek recruited to give voters "a link to the agricultural community" that was still dominant in the township.

Anderson later succeeded Malek, who didn't seek re-election in 2001, as supervisor. Anderson remains in the position today.

Also still in existence, thanks in part to Malek, are a number of township committees, 50 acres of open space acquired during his tenure and a train-station-turned-community-center that was later dedicated to Malek.

"I still go there (the center) and, to this day, I look at the stripe around the top of the room," he says, smiling. "I painted that."

Malek's law career has largely focused on insurance claims. After working for several private-practice firms, he became Travelers Insurance's regional manager of New York, overseeing 150 attorneys litigating 20,000 cases, in 2002.

But it's his hands-on approach to local government over the years that has landed him high-ranking positions, including chairman of the Campton Township Republican Party in the early '90s and, briefly, chairman of the Kane County Republican Party in 2002 before getting the job promotion.

"That was when it became apparent to me that my professional life, my family and my political career could not co-exist," he says.

Turns out, he couldn't stay away for long.

Sunday spotlight

A long look at local newsmakers

Ed Malek

Age: 54

Lives in: Campton Hills

Family: Nancy, wife of 30 years; children Patrick, 20, and Maggie, 24

Occupation: Regional legal counsel for Travelers Insurance, overseeing 150 attorneys in New York

Government office: President of the St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District board

Hobbies: Gardening, building models

On Chicago baseball: "I'm not a hater of the White Sox, but I love the Cubs."