News conference hardly transparent

Chris Lauzen, candidate for Kane County Board Chairman, announced Jan. 13 that he would hold a news conference on Jan. 17. I thought I’d go.

I was stopped at the door by Lauzen’s crack security team and asked who invited me. Obviously I didn’t have the right password. I was asked to leave. I wasn’t the only one. The topic of the meeting was transparency. The irony is unavoidable.

After the “private” news conference one of Lauzen’s campaign chairs told me I was asked to leave because of my association with Karen McConnaughay. I don’t work for the McConnaughay campaign either as a volunteer or a paid staffer.

From newspaper accounts Lauzen accused McConnaughay of “running a pay to play county.” Someone close to the campaign needs to inform Chris Lauzen that he is not running against Karen McConnaughay. His actual opponent is Kevin Burns, the mayor of Geneva, a multimillion dollar public enterprise employing hundreds of people.

If Lauzen is elected, can we expect this kind of xenophobic behavior to continue? What is so private about a news conference when local reporters have published the content of the meeting in their newspapers?

Lauzen was in the Illinois Senate for 20 years. There is a huge difference between an individual decision to vote no as a state senator and running a multimillion-dollar public enterprise employing hundreds of people. Lauzen, it appears, is experientially and temperamentally unprepared to run Kane County government.

Craig Conn

St. Charles