Carpentersville businessman offers $3,000 to destroy surplus guns

A Carpentersville business owner says he will pay the village $3,000 if trustees agree to destroy surplus police weapons instead of selling the guns for revenue.

Tom Roeser, president of Otto Engineering, floated his offer on a local blog site and in a letter to the editor of a local newspaper last week, after trustees rejected Village President Bill Sarto's attempt to block the sale of 32 firearms to a federally licensed gun dealer.

Village officials estimated the sale could net $3,000 in revenue for the village.

"If $3,000 is what it would take to make the rest of the board happy, then I would pay that," said Roeser, who owns dozens of townhouses in the village's Morningside neighborhood and has spent millions of dollars redeveloping properties near Otto's headquarters in the Old Town area of Carpentersville.

"I have made a lot of investments in this town, and this is insignificant relative to investments I have made in the past."

Village Manager Craig Anderson said the guns had not yet been sold, pending possible action on Roeser's proposal.

"The sale was put on hold because this may not be all figured out," Anderson said.

However, trustees on Tuesday said they would not contemplate the offer until the board received direct correspondence from Roeser.

"I need something in writing for us to reconsider what we have done," said Trustee Paul Humpfer, who said he was unaware of the offer until reading the blog over the weekend. "I need to see something in writing before moving forward with this situation. I want to understand why he is doing this."

Furthermore, Trustee Kay Teeter said, although rumors of Roeser's proposition had surfaced, specific information was not passed on to the board.

"We had not seen it in writing," Teeter said. "Wouldn't it be nice to have it in a letter the trustees, not just a letter to the editor? Wouldn't that have been more effective?"

Roeser, who called the veto rejection by a majority of the board "an act of stupidity," said the gun sales pose a public safety threat.

"These are defined as low-cost guns," Roeser said. "These guns are not used for hunting. Low-cost guns have the highest potential of getting into the hands of those who could abuse them."

Sarto based his veto message earlier this month on a similar premise, saying the sale contradicts the village's mission and raises public safety concerns.

"It is my belief that we should not take the chance that any of these weapons will end up in the wrong hands," Sarto said in his veto message. "It is our responsibility to provide a safe and secure community. It is our responsibility to make sure that we do all that we can to protect the lives of our residents and our police officers. In fact, to do less is to violate our own mission statement."

Trustees, and Police Chief David Neumann, though, have said there is no evidence of a former police-issued gun being used in a crime in Carpentersville.