Senior Kane County Board members say there's no information conspiracy

Despite recent comments, there is no conspiracy to keep information from certain Kane County Board members outside the leadership ranks, according to two of the more senior board members.

Recent candidate endorsement interviews of several sitting board members have yielded a common gripe. Board members Deborah Allan, Barbara Wojnicki, Sylvia Leonberger and Jennifer Laesch have all expressed frustration about hurdles to obtaining the information needed to support votes on the board floor.

Veteran board members Gerald Jones and Bill Wyatt said this week that county board members who lack information have no one but themselves to blame.

"It's their fault," Jones said. "I have never been in a situation in 18 years of being on the board when I could not go into a department head's office and get an answer to questions. As a board member, you have a responsibility to the folks who elected you to get the information. There shouldn't be any impediments."

Allan, in her endorsement interview, said the board has a "transparency" problem where information sharing is simply not always done. Leonberger said it's not a matter of asking questions as much as getting accurate answers. She indicated much of the budget drama developed because of conflicting or missing information among the treasurer, auditor and finance director as to what the true financial status of the county was.

"Every time you go ask a question, they'll sit, and they will give you three papers and say, 'This will explain everything where the money comes from,'" Leonberger said.

But Leonberger said those documents never really explained a complete financial picture.

Wyatt said the way to get the full picture of any situation is to ask the people directly involved. When board members don't take time to do that, then tempers flare during open meetings. Hence, the creation of what some people refer to as the "Bonnie Rule" (named after county board member Bonnie Kunkel), where board members who are not a committee chairman are not allowed to ask questions during the Executive Committee meetings.

"Every board member is welcome to go to every committee," Wyatt said. "That's where you need to get the work done. By the time things get to the floor of the (full) board, to take the debate and sort of move it back to square one because you didn't show up to the committee, or you didn't read the minutes from a month ago, or you failed to call the committee chair and ask them before the meeting to explain something - at that point, you're wasting time. You're not really willing to dig in and do the work."

Wojnicki recently said chairmen of committees are treated differently than the rest of the board and, in fact, secure those positions of leadership by voting the way county board Chairman Karen McConnaughy wants them to on key issues. Jones said that's not how committee chairmen are made.

"The people who are chairpeople have demonstrated that they're willing to work and find out what needs to be done and how to get about doing it," Jones said. "That's why they end up being chairs. They have respect. There's just a certain set of board members who have a certain level of animosity toward folks that they say cannot get that information. Half the time they don't ask the questions. The other half of the time when they get the answers to the questions they refuse to accept them."