Daily Herald opinion: Keeping it local: Setting stricter-than-needed campaign standards makes valuable statement to voters

First, let’s give props to village leaders in Arlington Heights — like those in some other suburban towns, including Aurora, Elgin and more — who recognize the impact of donations on political influence and set their own standards to try to control it.

Such limits don’t necessarily ensure objectivity or total fairness in officials’ decision making, but, along with the transparency of reporting them, help a community’s residents assess the degree to which their leaders are responding to special interests, rather than the public’s, in the actions they take.

Aside from donations from political parties, which have no limits, state finance laws prohibit candidates from accepting more than $7,300 from individuals, $14,600 from organizations or $72,800 from political action committees. Towns that see the need for stricter limits, show a keen awareness for special circumstances that may weigh on the confidence voters have in their local government.

In Arlington Heights, those circumstances include interests — from developers, businesses, private individuals and others — that may seek to sway village board members’ support or opposition to a deal with the Chicago Bears for a stadium development at the site of the former Arlington Park race track. This week, looking ahead to municipal elections next spring, the village board discussed the village’s donation caps and, to their credit, seemed inclined to keep them in place, with the not-unreasonable possibility of making adjustments to allow for inflation, because the limits have not changed since 2018.

Trustee Bill Manganaro, quoted in our Christopher Placek’s report on the discussion, put the matter in clear perspective.

“We all sat here over the past several months and listened to some people question our transparency around the Arlington Park project. We are under a little bit of a microscope with that project, however it gets developed … And being under that microscope, I think it behooves us in the village to have the highest standards of ethics that we can possibly achieve,” he said.

“The highest standards of ethics we can achieve” certainly ought to be the objective of every elected official at any level, of course, but the statements of Manganaro and others on the board recognize that statutory conditions help reassure voters of just how committed their local leaders are to them.

This is not to say that Manganaro’s colleague Colin Gilbert, who made a case for returning to the state limits, doesn’t have a point about ethical implications inherent in the policy. Gilbert worried that a board may be reinforcing a cynical “expectation that there’s going to be some unscrupulous, unethical things happening” by adopting their own standards.

“I don’t feel that way about our town,” Gilbert said. “I don’t feel that way about this board. I don’t think that there’s this presumption that there’s going to be something unethical and therefore we have to keep these limits low.”

Gilbert’s faith in his fellow board members is admirable, and — whether for Arlington Heights or most other towns — probably merited. But voters don’t always see things that way, and in the back of our minds, we still hear the voice of Ronald Reagan reminding us to “trust, but verify.”

Having local standards for political donations while making sure residents know who is donating how much to their government representatives is an important way of acknowledging that when it comes to ethical pressures, not all towns are created equal. We’re glad to hear Arlington Heights officials demonstrating that awareness, and hope town leaders throughout the suburbs apply similar scrutiny to themselves in matters of gaining the confidence of their communities’ voters.