Kane County names Metra appointee finalists
Only one of four finalists selected by a task force Friday will become Kane County’s new appointee to the Metra board of directors. And all four have a wealth of political experience and a long history of being on government payrolls as the county seeks an appointee that will help end the specter of cronyism on the embattled Metra board.
The finalists are:
타 Phil Bus, the former longtime development director for Kane County. He is currently a paid consultant for the county.
타 Joseph Galvan, a president of an urban planning firm. He is a former regional director for the U.S. Housing and Urban Development, and a former development director/planner for the city of Country Club Hills and the villages of Franklin Park and Maywood. He also has a long history of activism with the Republican Party.
타 Sue Klinkhamer, the former mayor of St. Charles. She most recently served as a district director for former Democratic Congressman Bill Foster.
타 Mike McCoy, the former Kane County Board chairman. He recently served on the county’s redistricting committee and works for Omega & Associates, an engineering firm with which the county contracts.
The task force has already agreed on one of the four candidates as the person they will recommend to Kane County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay for the appointment. The task force is expected to submit a final report on its choice to McConnaughay by early next week. McConnaughay will then ask some follow-up questions of the person chosen by the task force before the name is made public. The appointment is McConnaughay’s to make but the full county board will also take a vote.
McConnaughay said she did not provide any input to the task force on who to select, nor did she make her own list of finalists for consideration.
“The task force members make their selections on their own and without comparing notes with each other,” she said. “The result was basically a statistical dead heat between the final four.”
Task force members said they selected finalists from a ranking of all 41 applicants done by each task force member. The maximum number of points any applicant could receive was 20. Task force members said all of the finalists were generally ranked with scores in the high teens if not a perfect 20.
“I think the county would be well served by any one of those names left in the final four,” said task force member Jesse Vazquez. “We all had very similar lists of names in our top fives. Picking from these top four was real tough. It’s important that we announce the procedure we followed to get to the top candidates in our final report.”
Task force member Drew Frasz said one key point for everyone to remember is even the person chosen as the appointee is just a candidate for a spot that isn’t even vacant.
Former Kane County Board member Caryl Van Overmeiren is the county’s current representative on the Metra board. Thus far she has refused to resign despite McConnaughay’s request for her to step down.
“The task force has had nothing to do with Caryl,” Frasz said. “I can understand the difficulty of her situation. Resigning puts a blemish on your record and implies some impropriety. There certainly hasn’t been any evidence of that in regard to Caryl.”