O'Brien: I have the experience, record to transform Cook Co.

Metropolitan Water Reclamation District President Terrence O'Brien sells himself as a good-government professional with the experience to transform Cook County as he bids to become president of the county board.

"I'm very proud of our record," he said of his 21 years on the water reclamation board, the last 12 as president. "I want to do for the Cook County government what I've basically done for the water reclamation district ... I think the county government needs to be run as a business and not the way it's being run now. It's like a social club."

A not very sociable social club, he allowed.

"There doesn't seem to be a dialogue taking place between the current president and his board," O'Brien said during an endorsement interview at the Daily Herald. "It's really sad when you go to some of the meetings and there are personal barbs being thrown at each other... the attitude needs to change."

But how would a person coming in from the outside effect that change?

"You have to show that you're a leader and that you care and that you're willing to work hard," O'Brien said.

Without dismissing the other challengers to incumbent President Todd Stroger, O'Brien insisted he's the only one with experience running a major government taxing body on the order of Cook County, as the water reclamation district's $1.6 billion annual budget is about half the size of Cook's.

And while he lives on Chicago's Northwest Side in the Edgebrook neighborhood, he said the contacts he's built with suburban mayors and village presidents as head of the MWRD - assigned, after all, to protect the greater Chicago area's water supply and avert disaster from rain and runoff countywide - give him a connection to suburban voters.

O'Brien said he would pursue government efficiencies and new forms of nontax revenue to make things run more efficiently, just as he says he has at MWRD.

"We can't continue to tax our way out of problems," he said.

O'Brien said he'd bring the county into compliance with the Shakman decree by imposing the same exam system for nonexempt positions used at the MWRD, so that you "hire people for what they know and not who they know." He'd also put county departments on the same computer system and use interdepartmental procurement for supplies and services. He would try to unify the county board and the forest preserve district, claiming that there's a lot of redundancy in the division between the two, as the same board administers both.

He pointed to how he is the only Democratic candidate in the Feb. 2 primary to unequivocally favor the full rollback of the one percentage point increase in the sales tax imposed last year that was recently cut in half to take effect next year. (Both Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle and Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy Brown have said they favor a full rollback as other sources of revenue are found.)

On that, O'Brien, like Preckwinkle, says much is available in state and federal funding, but added that he is the one with the most experience in procuring such grants, pointing to ongoing plans to create three major reservoirs countywide. This includes the already completed O'Hare reservoir near the Des Plaines oasis on the Northwest Tollway. At a cost of $45 million, he said, it's already saved residents $100 million in flood costs.

He said state and federal grants are simply a matter of pursuing what's available.

"There's a lot of paperwork involved," he said, "and you've got to be willing to get it done."

O'Brien dismissed charges that he's run a race-based campaign as the only white in the Democratic race, saying he's campaigning in every neighborhood across the county.

He also insisted his good-government credentials are not spoiled by those who have questioned the unlimited use of county-owned cars granted to members of the MWRD board.

"It's a small amount (of money) for what they need to do," O'Brien said, "as far as getting out to meetings and things of that nature," such as water plants and public hearings. He added he would strictly review use of county cars.