Daily Herald opinion: Carpentersville trustee-turned-village manager will be learning on the job

For the sake of Carpentersville taxpayers, we wish newly minted Carpentersville Village Manager John O'Sullivan all the luck in the world.

He will need it.

You might know O'Sullivan as the senior village trustee of Carpentersville, which he was until Monday, when his resignation went into effect. He already had quit his job as distribution sales manager at Otto Engineering.

O'Sullivan, 62, had a lot riding on Tuesday night's vote to name him village manager, an assurance he was given after Village President John Skillman conducted a straw poll individually with other trustees to ensure a vote would go smoothly in his favor.

There are a couple of troubling aspects to O'Sullivan's hiring beyond the optics, chief among them O'Sullivan's lack of experience.

Sure, O'Sullivan has been a village trustee for six years. He has 25 years of management experience, the last 13 years at Otto. He's led the village's audit and finance committee. But there is a great deal more to running a village than knowing how to manage people, especially in a home-rule community of 38,000 like Carpentersville. That's why people go to college to learn the ins and outs of it.

The second troubling issue is a lack of transparency. As Tuesday's vote to hire O'Sullivan illustrates, where there were no comments, offers of congratulation or explanation of why O'Sullivan was chosen, much of how the village board operates is done behind the scenes. Residents rarely get a glimpse of what's really on the minds of those who run their village. Meetings tend to be short, perfunctory affairs with little discussion.

This is a culture that's been cultivated. Years ago, when Bill Sarto was mayor, village board meetings were circuses. Just check out the YouTube videos that chronicled them. Name-calling, rancor, hooting and hollering. And not just from the audience. It even attracted the attention of The New York Times.

It was not a good look, and we wouldn't relish a return to that.

But there must be a happy medium. And with O'Sullivan at the helm, we don't expect it.

A year ago, he advocated for halting the recording and airing of village board meetings, saying he didn't want to subject the village to the kind of ridicule it received during the Sarto days.

But upon receiving the manager's job, he noted transparency is important. That's a real disconnect.

We understand Skillman's desire to hire someone he trusts and believes will stick around longer than former manager Eric Johnson, who moved on after four years. Skillman wasn't confident the three candidates he and O'Sullivan vetted would stick around or be a good fit. So he turned to O'Sullivan and asked him to take the job.

The situation in Carpentersville is unusual but not unheard of here. Lake Barrington named a trustee village administrator. We've seen police chiefs become village managers in Vernon Hills and Mundelein. And last year, the mayor of Lakemoor resigned to become village administrator after a couple of high-level administrative departures.

The optics of such moves are rarely good. We hope O'Sullivan is a quick study and that he proves us wrong on our concerns about transparency.