Daily Herald opinion: A lesson on listening: There’s a particular message in results that upended GOP majority in Wheeling Township

It may not have been the Wheeling Township Board’s stubborn refusal to fund a voter-approved Mental Health Board that cost Republicans the supervisor’s seat and their majority on Tuesday. The swelling blue tide is no longer a new political phenomenon in the suburbs.

But the township’s Republicans certainly didn’t do themselves or their party any favors by repeatedly refusing, even in the face of state law specifically pertaining to them, to fund a voter-approved Mental Health Board at the level voters approved. Now, cultural shift or no, they have felt the sting of openly defying the voters’ will.

Some of the Democrats on the slate that swept into control of the township board were active in support of the 2022 referendum that approved creation of a 708 Mental Health Board to oversee programs to help people with mental health issues, substance use disorders and developmental disabilities. Now, they’re in position not just to levy the full tax but also to move in new directions on other issues.

Wisely, they are not rushing to broadly reshape township policy — one new member told our Steve Zalusky they will spend their first few months familiarizing themselves with details of its operations — but they will surely have a different overall agenda than the board would have had if Republicans had maintained control.

And to that point, the Wheeling Township Democrats will do well to watch how their party fares in coming elections in areas where they have newly gained control. Democrats in DuPage County have dramatically changed spending priorities and gone so far as to strip the county criminal justice center of popular former Congressman Henry Hyde’s name. Those in Kane County pushed a sales tax referendum to fund $51 million in public safety improvements that voters soundly rejected on Tuesday.

The blue tide is not by any means permanent.

The 708 funding and oversight that Wheeling Township voters authorized — like several similar boards throughout the suburbs and one approved overwhelmingly Tuesday in Palatine Township — provide a clear, identifiable need, and the mental health boards represent a strategic means of concentrating on it. So, it has been encouraging to see the willingness of so many populations in the suburbs step up to support the 708 Mental Health Board concept.

But Wheeling Township leaders had been alone in their refusal to listen to voters, indeed to go so far with their defiance as to ignore technical revisions in state law intended to respond to concerns they expressed about language in the referendum authorizing their board. Now, voters have made clear their insistence on being heard.

“Myself and my team will be following the will of the voters and enacting the levy that was passed by referendum two years ago,” said newly elected Township Supervisor Maria Zeller Brauer, who unseated incumbent Kathy Penner.

Those are comforting words to hear. But Brauer and other Democrats throughout the suburbs should heed well that phrase “following the will of the voters.” We hold elections for a reason, and the Wheeling Township results are a particularly acute example of what it is.