Winfield United suffers first major defeat

As the Winfield vote totals started pouring in Tuesday, Tim Allen and Tony Reyes started joking about which one of them would ultimately end up with the most votes.

They had comfortable leads in their trustee race with Jim Hughes and incumbents Glenn VadeBonCoeur and Cliff Mortenson and were more than a little confident of victory.

It was a far cry from 2009, when Allen finished fifth in an eight-candidate race and Reyes failed in a bid to become village president. Both lost to Winfield United-backed candidates.

On Tuesday, both overcame the same group’s endorsements of VadeBonCoeur, Mortenson and Hughes to become the top two vote getters.

“People are tired of an organization of 25 people running the village of 9,000,” Reyes said. “If they would have worked as hard fixing the roads and infrastructure as they did in trying to keep us out of office, this town would be in perfect shape.”

During the often-bitter campaign, Reyes and Allen, who post regularly on a blog that is highly critical of Winfield United, became the targets of what they say were coordinated attacks by Winfield United’s political arm.

They have accused a local newspaper of being run by Winfield United and said Village President Deb Birutis — who defeated Reyes in 2009 — unfairly targeted their campaign signs for removal during street sweeps.

Winfield United officials and Birutis have denied these claims.

The angry rhetoric on both sides of the political divide boiled over at a village board meeting last month. Critics of Winfield United told trustees the group had turned the village into “a joke.”

A Winfield United board member responded by saying his group was not the problem, instead laying the blame on supporters of Allen and Reyes.

The group has been a major player in village politics since its creation in 2004. Two trustees and Birutis were backed by Winfield United. Additionally, Winfield United village presidents have appointed two more trustees and Joel Kunesh, who died in February while in office, also received Winfield United support. Birutis is expected to appoint his replacement Thursday.

Critics say the group’s monopolized power has suffocated development because some of its members do not want to see storefronts along Roosevelt Road on the village’s southern edge. Allen said he made the decision to focus his campaign on that issue immediately.

For the first time in the group’s history on Tuesday, an endorsed candidate lost an election.

“It’s slipping away,” Allen said of the group’s hold on the village’s politics. “At about election No. 4, people really get to know what you are all about.”

Despite his defeat, Mortenson said the election results will be a good thing for Winfield because it places multiple viewpoints on the board.

“Even though I lost, I feel the village made the right decision,” he said. “They have three very qualified candidates.”

Mortenson said he was unfairly painted as a Winfield United loyalist. However, he said having two groups so adamant about their positions can have some positive effect, despite the divisions that grow because of them.

“Both Winfield United and Winfield 411 (the blog Reyes and Allen contribute on) have raised a tremendous amount of issues and brought some important ones to the forefront,” he said. “That’s the positive side of what is happening here.”

“(However) I didn’t get in this to lose,” he said. “But I’m satisfied with the results of what happened.”

Allen said he plans renew a failed effort to get the village divided into voting districts for future elections.

Reyes and Hughes both said they would support placing the measure on the ballot to see what residents want to do.

Hughes is a relative newcomer to Winfield. He has lived in town for about a year and during the campaign at one point received support from residents on both sides of the divide.

“Residents sent a message loud and clear,” he said of his election. “It sends the message that the village is more important than political interest groups.”

Trustee Glenn VadeBonCoeur did not return calls seeking comment.