County board losing half century of experience

Things will look a lot different in a few weeks inside the DuPage County Board chambers.

With two members retiring, two being voted out and one moving to higher office in Springfield, more than a quarter of the seats on the board soon will feature new faces.

In addition, several key committee leadership posts are opening up. Pam Rion's retirement means the transportation chairman's seat will be vacant for the first time in a decade. Tom Bennington's departure leaves the public works committee chairman's job open as well. Yolanda Campuzano and Michael Connelly are chairmen of the health and human services committee and economic development committee, respectively. Robert Schroeder is also retiring and leaving the board vice chairman's post empty.

All five - who have a combined 52 years of experience on the board - have seats on a number of other committees that also need to be filled

Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom is in charge of plugging those holes and deciding who should lead the committees. The board approves his recommendations.

"I want to put people in spots where they want to be and where they think their strengths are," he said. "It's a bit of a process."

A process made a tad more vexing this go-round because of all the new bodies and the fact that three of the newcomers are Democrats. Schillerstrom is a Republican but said he won't play politics with committee assignments and lump all of the Democrats into the same committees.

However, one of the things that may change is the number of committees. Schillerstrom believes 14 committees may be a bit much for 18 board members.

"I think we could get by with less committees," he said. "We certainly don't need as many committees as we have and that's something we're going to talk about."

Board members said it's also important that committees aren't overloaded with representatives from the same district.

"In my district we have always had a definite support network," said District 5 board member James Healy of Naperville. "In my time we'd have one of us zero in on finance and public safety stuff, another would zero in on health and human service type things and then I did what's called bricks and mortar."

Schillerstrom admits there's no art or science to committee assignments and he knows that some board members won't get everything they want.

"One of the good things about having committees, and some people prove not to be a good fit, there's always others on the committee to pick up the slack," he said.