County board will take weekend to whittle Metra list

Kane County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay should soon have a firm list of three to five finalists to become the county’s new representative to the Metra board after a task force agreed to a rough list of qualifications for the job Thursday night.

The five-member task force met in a closed-door meeting for the first time since receiving 41 applications for the job earlier this week. Resumes were due Monday but task force members didn’t receive the full packet until Wednesday, defeating earlier predictions by the task force that they’d have a list of finalists by last night.

“Not all the task force members had gone through all 41 resumes, and they need to carefully review all of them,” McConnaughay said after the meeting. “It’s a lot to go through. In order to give everyone a fair opportunity, they’ll take the weekend to finish going through them.”

Each task force member will evaluate the candidates based on their own readings of some basic leadership qualities such as availability, relevant experience and sense of mission, McConnaughay said.

By the end of the day Monday, each task force member will then submit a list of their top three choices to McConnaughay. McConnaughay will not generate her own list.

Even if each of the remaining task force members has unique choices, the maximum number of candidates left by Monday will be 12.

McConnaughay will compile any mutual choices into a list of finalists. Those finalists will then appear before the entire task force on Friday, June 24, for an interview. The task force will vote on the eventual replacement based on those interviews and submit the candidate to the full county board for a vote in July.