Cronin wins DuPage Co. Board chair race

State Sen. Dan Cronin easily won the Republican nod to be his party's candidate for DuPage County Board chairman.

Unofficial results show Cronin collected almost half of the votes cast in the four-way race, with all 749 precincts reporting.

Current District 4 county board member Debra Olson trailed with nearly 28 percent of the vote. Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso and state Sen. Carole Pankau split the remaining votes with 12 percent apiece.

"We ran a great campaign, and I think the margin of victory was significant enough that it should be pretty clear the direction we want to go," Cronin said.

Cronin will face Democrat Carole Cheney in November.

Whoever wins that race will replace longtime board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom, who gave up the post to run an unsuccessful GOP gubernatorial bid.

Cronin initially waffled on the idea of running for board chairman. He was one of the first Republicans to publicly announce his bid for the seat, but shortly thereafter pulled back from the campaign and talked to others about running for the office. The 50-year-old Elmhurst resident approached Grasso and Pankau about running for the office, a move he made as head of the county Republican Party. He spent more than $300,000 on his primary campaign, according to the state's election board Web site.

A former prosecutor in the DuPage state's attorney's office, Cronin was elected a state representative in 1991. He won his Senate seat in 1993 and has held it ever since. District 2 county board member Jeff Redick is a partner at Cronin's law firm.

Olson is the only sitting county board member who sought the chairman's post after initial interest from several board members. The 46-year-old Wheaton resident is in the middle of her third term on the county board. Her candidacy centered on a campaign-finance reform platform that caught her plenty of flak from Cronin and Pankau. The two sides accused her filling her campaign coffers with money from county vendors and then declaring she wouldn't take money from companies that do business with the county. Olson responded that she had returned any funds donated by county vendors and attacked the two state senators for not doing the same.

Olson owns an electrical contracting company with her husband. She was first elected to the county board in 2002. Before that, she was elected to the regional school board and served one term that began in 1999.

Cronin disputed that he engaged in any negative campaigning during the election.

"Never once did I take a shot from my lips or in my literature at any of the other candidates," he said. "I know a lot of people talked about negative campaigning, but I think my campaign is a testament to how positive campaigning works."

Pankau never seemed to campaign for the office; instead she appeared to run against Olson. Missives from her camp generally attacked Olson's campaign. She called on Olson to drop out of the race for failing to keep a campaign promise to update her Web site with contribution information and also incorrectly attacked Olson for taking a $3,000 committee chairman stipend.

Grasso campaigned as a political outsider who wanted to keep "Springfield-style politics" out of DuPage. The 58-year-old lawyer is in his second term as Burr Ridge mayor and has served on the county's health board for more than a decade.

DuPage is one of the few taxing bodies predicting an uptick in sales tax revenue this year, which has Cronin concerned about next year's budget. The county's current budget did not require any layoffs, but it froze salaries and hiring. Just two years ago, the county needed a sales tax rate increase in order to stave off massive layoffs.

With one more budget to be passed before the next chairman takes office, Cronin said he'd like to be at the county government complex in Wheaton more often between now and the election to monitor the budgeting process. However, he said he trusts the county board to act responsibly when building next year's budget.

"I'm going to try and focus on the work I have to do in Springfield and try to balance all the rest of what's happening," he said.

If elected, Cronin has indicated he would hire a county administrator to run the day-to-day operations of the county. It's notcertain where he'd get the funds for that post.

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