Wegman leading in the race for Kane County recorder
Republican incumbent Sandy Wegman was leading in the Kane County recorder of deeds race against Democrat Marisela Villegas.
As of 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, unofficial results showed Wegman with 106,384 votes and Villegas with 98,070 votes.
The recorder’s office is the custodian of all the land records in the county.
Wegman has been the recorder since 2000. She said she sought another term to maintain the integrity of the land records and to ensure the public can continue to access them online at no cost. Kane was among the first collar counties to make land records viewable online for free.
The Elgin resident said she fears a new recorder would implement a paid system for viewing the documents on a website.
Villegas, an Aurora resident who works for the recorder’s office, is making her first run for elected office.
According to her campaign website, Villegas is committed to ensuring a low cost of operations, a high level of staff training and providing the highest level of customer service.
Villegas also promised to keep the viewing documents on the web free to the public.
Wegman says future improvements for the office include a plan to move information to the cloud. She says the change will allow the recorder’s office to eliminate all or most of its physical servers and reduce costs.
In addition to putting land records online free, Wegman says Kane County is among the first counties to mandate MyDec registration when transferring property. Her office has always come in under budget, she adds.
During the Democratic primary, Villegas said she wanted to move images of older documents onto the recorder’s website so people could view them without having to come into the Geneva office. She said the current website only shows documents going back to the 1960s.
In addition, Villegas indicated on her website that she understands the benefits technology brings to the office. She added that she is committed to using the latest technological innovations to improve the customer experience and further reduce the cost of operations.