Cronin makes exception to new blood on DuPage Water Commission

Despite championing a state law that requires every member of the DuPage Water Commission to resign by the end of the year, county board Chairman Dan Cronin is planning to reappoint one familiar face to help reform the embattled agency.

That person is county board member Jim Zay.

In fact, Cronin said Tuesday he wants Zay to become chairman of the commission, which delivers Lake Michigan drinking water to more than a dozen communities.

“He is determined to get this thing right,” Cronin said of Zay. “It helps me because he does have institutional knowledge. It's important to have some continuity.”

And because Zay is a county board member, Cronin said, “it will enable me to have a closer connection to what's going on over there.”

In addition to asking the county board to approve Zay's appointment as commission chairman next week, Cronin also hopes to fill four of the six remaining county seats on the water panel. The four nominees are Laura Crawford of Naperville, president and CEO of the Downers Grove Area Chamber of Commerce & Industry; Glen Ellyn resident Bradley Webb, controller and general counsel with Packey Webb Ford; Downers Grove resident Michael Scheck, sales director with Scheck Industries; and Daniel Loftus of Downers Grove, a founder and managing partner of an engineering design firm.

The two other county seats on the panel will be filled later.

Meanwhile, municipal leaders are in the process of picking six of their own representatives on the 13-member water panel, which has been rocked by fallout from fiscal mismanagement.

Zay, a water commissioner since August 2008, says he wants the opportunity to help turn the agency around and make it more transparent.

“I feel a responsibility,” Zay said. “It needs to be fixed. I want to go in there and make the changes that need to be done.”

The legislation Cronin pushed for as a state lawmaker came after the commission accidentally spent its $69 million in reserves through poor accounting practices and lackadaisical financial oversight.

While the water commission fired its financial administrator and forced the agency's longtime general manager to resign, the reform measure requires every commissioner to step down by the end of the year. That state law also eliminates by 2016 a quarter-cent sales tax that goes to the commission.

Zay said the biggest challenge will be to run the commission like a utility “and not have the sales tax as a crutch.”

But first, the new county and municipal representatives will need to come together and work toward a common goal.

“This isn't an issue of county verses municipal anymore,” Zay said. “This is about getting the water out and making it (the commission) more accountable to the taxpayers of DuPage.”

That process will start with commissioners making significant hiring decisions.

“We need to get a new general manager in there,” Zay said. “We have to get a new treasurer appointed. We have to get a new chief financial officer in there, a whole new upper management.”

Zay said the next step will be to draft “a sound” financial plan and a construction plan that outlines genuine “needs” to maintain the distribution system. “Not these wishes and wants like they wanted last time,” he said.

Water: New manager, treasurer, CFO part of the plan