Douglas Bennett: Candidate Profile

Note: Answers provided have not been edited for grammar, misspellings or typos. In some instances, candidate claims that could not be immediately verified have been omitted. Jump to:BioKey IssuesQA Bio City: DeerfieldWebsite: http://douglasbennett.org/Office sought: Lake County board District 21Age: 48Family: Married, 3 childrenOccupation: Computer ConsultantEducation: B.S. Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, 1985Civic involvement: Candidate did not respond.Elected offices held: NoneHave you ever been arrested for or convicted of a crime? If yes, please explain: NoCandidate's Key Issues Key Issue 1 Pension ReformKey Issue 2 Fiscal ResponsibilityKey Issue 3 Candidate did not respond.Questions Answers The county remains in the black, but property taxes across the region are high. Should programs be cut to save taxpayers money? If so, which ones and why?I think I need to digress to begin with on an overview of how I see the county's financial picture.This is obviously going to be an extremely high-level fly over.The county, on a yearly basis is in the black, and that is true even when tax revenues are low due to the on-going recession.The county government should be structured in such a way that during economic downturns there is still enough money to cover essential services, even if there could be cutbacks in more optional ones.The county has three basic cost centers.The county runs Lake County hospital and a variety of ancillary medical services, which tends to be a relatively fixed expense, though it does incurred additional bad debt write-offs during bad economic times.The county also runs the Lake County courthouse, along with a similar suite of support services revolving around justice and law enforcement.Once again, this cost does not fluctuate wildly during hard times.So the county has two major fixed expenses and a variable income.The last major county cost center is transportation, including road maintenance and new construction.In truth, this is the only major section of the budget where the county has the ability to delay improvements from lean times to lush times.A sensible budgetary process would have enough revenue in hard times to cover health and judicial services, plus those transportation issues which require urgent attention.In better times, with more on-hand revenue, the county would catch up on transportation spending, setting itself up in good shape for the next business cycle.The fact that the county offered early retirements in this last cycle (a particularly inefficient and counterproductive form of layoffs where you only let go the best employees) may be because the fall-off in revenues were far greater thant could have been anticipated, but I have my doubts.It seems to be that the county doesn't see far past the end of the year, if indeed that it sees that far at all.Still, the fact that there is more revenue than expense, even at the low point of revenue collection would indicate that the tax rates are higher even than required to provide the services we have.Normally I'd be in favor of rebating them back to the taxpayers by lowing property tax rates, but these are not normally times.Reading the budget reveals a singularly optimistic outlook for the coming year, with increasing revenues and blue skies ahead.I am a conservative person by nature, I'd like to know the worst case scenario has well, and make sure we have contingency plans in place for it.The current crisis in Europe and the incipient crisis in China would lead me to prefer a less rosy set of assumptions for the new year.While I hope things work out as well as Lake County guesses, I really have my doubts. Beyond that though, we know that we get about one sixth of our revenue from other government agencies, particularly the State of Illinois, and the Federal government.If I was looking at a business where one of my major customers was as much of an economic basket caseas the State of Illinois is,I'd be worried that I wouldn't see the income I'd expect, and that I'd have to write off as bad debt shortages from that customer. Looking at the amount of money the State of Illinois has promised to people and the amount of money it actually has, it isn't hard to imagine that there could well be a large number of entities mightthat would not receivethe money that they have been promised.If the State can't make good on its reimbursements, what is Lake County's plan to deal with it?I couldn't see any.As much as I would naturally tend to lower property taxes to be more in line with required spending, I don't think I can, in good conscience return the money back to the taxpayers until the State's financial predicament is resolved.There is an odd thing about the question though, if we are collecting more money than we spend, then the first dollar we return to the taxpayers wouldn't come from program cuts, but simply from the fact that we are taking in more than we need.Still, I think we ought to review major programs to see if we can remove things that don't deliver essential services, or are wildly overpriced.Unfortunately, one of the goals of the writers of the budgetis to hide those areas by merging them with vital services, so it will take a deeper level of forensic accountingto weed them out.I don't have the information, at this point, to pick a specific program that I know ought to be discontinued, but once you dig more deeply into several of the detailed areas of the budget, I would suspect that there are things Lake County could afford to do without.That job of doing a hard auditand oversight ought to take place regardless of whether we store some of the money for contingency spending or rebate some portion of real estate taxes back to the taxpayers, some of whom desperately need it.What should be done with the Fort Sheridan golf course? If no building or management proposals come back from vendors, do you propose abandoning golf? If so, are you concerned about a lawsuit? If you propose building a course, how should it be funded?From my perspective, it appears relatively straight forward.Lake Country received land (with a golf course on part of it) with the clear understanding that it would maintain the golf course.In order to obtain the land from the US Army, it promised to do that.Once in possession of the land, it seems that Lake County wants to renege on its promise, so as to use the land for other purposes.The language and intent is of the deed restriction is pretty clear, even though the Forest Preserve has managed to shut down the previous course through neglect (benign or otherwise).I think that it is important for Lake County to keep its word, and if the acquisition of the land was worth maintaining the golf course, then we should do that.If it truly isn't, then return the land to the Army.Of course, even with the price of rehabilitating the golf course, obtaining the land is a great deal for Lake County.If no vendor is coming forward with a proposal, then it's pretty obvious that the restrictions on the deal are too onerous for anyone to seriously entertain them, unless we have concluded that golf courses themselves are economically infeasible.Given the fact there are upwards of thirty courses in Lake County, that last statement is relatively ridiculous.The reason no one is seriously considering these proposals it seems to me, is that Lake County would keep their investment, set the greens fee, and only allow them to get the profits of the course.That wouldn't sound like a good deal to anyone. I rent out apartments, but if I let an apartment run down and did not maintain it for years, I seriously doubt I could get someone to rent it on the basis that they could make improvements, but when the lease was up, I would keep the value of those improvements.The reason no one is seriously considering these proposals it seems to me, is that Lake County would keep their investment, set the greens fee, and only allow them to get the profits of the course.That wouldn't sound like a good deal to anyone.If the county can renege on its promises to residents of Highwood and Highland Park simply by inactivity and neglect, then what's to prevent them from reneging on other promises'I don't know why the Army felt obliged to preserve the course, but that being said, we have not kept up our end of the deal.That should not be acceptable to any of our residents.Holding our governing bodies to the plain language their promises should not be a debatable point.When we lose that, we loosen the bonds between the government and the people it purports claims to represent. I would advocate rehabilitating the golf course as a necessary expenditure to fulfill the requirements of the deed restriction.I would have the Lake County Forest Preserve cover that out of the budget for improvements, and then find a tenant to run the course at a price sufficient to cover all maintenance costs, to prevent this from being a recurring issue.The Winchester House nursing home recently was turned over to a private company for operation. Should other county or forest district departments be privatized to save taxpayers money? Please explain.There are two answers to this, as there are two drivers of privatization.As a computer consultant and software developer, I am often faced with the decision of "build vs buy", that is whether to buy a product on the open market that is close to our needs or build (design, code, and deploy) the software in-house.Wherever possible, my advice is to "buy", the cost of gaining expertise is spread over many customers, it has a relatively fixed price, and it is hard to imagine that the firm I work at (whichever one I have worked at) will be better at every task than anyone else.Every organization spends time to gain expertise and it should really focus that time on its core businesses and strengths. As an organization, Lake County is no different, it should focus its expertise in the specialized areas that are relatively unique to county government and use outside resources for things that are not germane to its primary and specialized role.I will give an obvious example of a core task, to highlight the point.Since Lake County runs its own Law Enforcement Division, it would never make any sense to privatize or out-source security personnel, as that is a core strength of county government.Departments, or tasks within departments that can be bought in a highly competitive marketplace, should be purchased by the county as a finished product, rather than run or built directly.The goal here is not primarily to save money, but to utilize highly skilled companies and individuals on an as-needed basis, when what we want is the results of their work.The facts that we often share the cost with other customers also saves the county money, results in a better service, and is available in a shorter time frame are (welcome) secondary effects of privatization.On the Lake County Board, my vote will be, whenever feasible, to privatize non-core tasks.That is the first reason to privatize, but there is another completely different reason.Lake County and governments in general have been unable to successfully negotiate with public sector unions comprised of votersover the last forty years, and perhaps as much as sixty years.This has lead to wild, uncontrolled growth in spending, particularly on pensions, health care and other non-taxable, long-term benefits and commitments to members of public sector unions.Current governments have bound future governments to expensive, unfunded, long-term commitments, raising the price of employees far in excess of their private sector competitorscounterparts.This is not solely a Lake County problem, and they are far from the worst offenders, but neither are they immune from the scourge. The Winchester House privatization seems to be driven primarily by a need to reduce Lake County's long term pension commitments, given what seems a political reality that negotiating, or re-negotiating the contracts with the union will only end badly.To me this seem a dereliction of dutynot to try to properly negotiate a pension plan that Lake County can live with and still be able to hire employees in a competitive way, but there is surely no passion on the board to take on such a thankless task.The truth remains though, that until we have corrected the problem we have with pensions and benefits, outsourcing departments in an effort to reduce long-term liabilities by reducing the number of employees directly working for the county will remain a viable short- to medium term solution to provide cost effective solutions on behalf of the taxpayers of Lake County.I would probably reluctantly support this kind of privatization.Reluctantly, because in the long run, Lake County is a law enforcement service, a road and transportation service, and a health care service and Winchester House in a health care service.Winchester House would normally be on the periphery of core government services, and, in truth, without this overarching backdrop of high long term liabilities associated with government employees, would not normally be a candidate for privatization.I think this form of privatization is an attempt to finesse a major problem with pensions, but I understand the fiduciary responsibility that Board members have to not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good.To that end, I would support privatization of tasks closer to what I feel we should normally keep in-house, until such a time as we solve the problem with government pensions and labor contracts.Is there a specific type of service or amenity that is lacking in your district? If so, how do you propose to provide and fund that?Q.Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your government grow?A. By looking for more things to do with the taxpayers money, whenever we get a few extra dollars. In general, I think the goal of government is not to provide amenities, but essential services. Even the thrust of the most questions of the Herald revolve around how to use the money entrusted to the county board wisely.The core role of the county government is to provide health services (Lake County Hospital), judicial services (Lake County Courthouse), and road maintenance.Everyone has some ideas on the things that they want, and would have if everyone else had to pay for them.The county has been around since 1839, do we really think that there is a core services that the county has completely forgotten to provide for over 173 years' The short answer is no, we haven't forgotten anything crucial, and we shouldn't be off looking for new things to do when we already have a lot of things to contend with.Should the county continue to pursue open space policies' Why or why not?Open space policies are designed to protect Lake County from the residents (or potential residents) who actually live here.There is an underlying assumption here that the environment needs to be protected from the people who live and work here, and that it is more important (at least to some people) than the residents, on whose behalf the county board and the forest preserve board are supposed to be employed.Iwill speak to what I feel is the intent of the question, and that answer is straight forward.Providing empty space is not a core service of the county government, so no, I do not support open space policies in general.What I do support is sensible flood management and storm runoff management, which would including leaving some spaces open for those purposes. I also support managing some sensible amount of park land for the enjoyment, education, and entertainment of the residents in a more natural or outdoor setting.And, of course if an outside independent group wants to buy land and leave it unused, that is their own decision, I would not argue against independent expenditures by concerned citizens, nor by donations to the county for that expressed purpose (through a deed restriction).Of course, on that last point, it is once again important for the county to be true to its word.