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Pino welcomes challenges as N. Barrington president

While a few especially heated election campaigns are just beginning to warm up the frozen Northwest suburbs, North Barrington residents won’t have to wait until April 5 to find out who their new village president will be.

Six-year Trustee Al Pino is uncontested in his bid to succeed Village President Bruce Sauer, to the delight of his fellow board members and Sauer himself.

Pino, a workers’ compensation and personal injury attorney based in McHenry, said he approaches the job with no agenda to significantly change the way North Barrington does business.

In fact, he shares many of Sauer’s same passions for the environment and conservation, he said.

Those principles in some way inform every policy the current board has created or revised — including barring fences so that the area’s wildlife can roam freely, he said.

Like the three village trustees running uncontested April 5 — Pete Boland, Mark Kolar and Lawrence Weiner — Pino interprets the lack of challenges in this year’s election as a sign residents are content.

“In the last few years, we’ve been making a decisive effort to listen to what the people are saying,” Pino said.

He’s proud of the way the village has handled its finances in recent years, always spending less than budgeted. That leaves the village better prepared for uncontrollable expenses like those created by last week’s blizzard. The storm likely will affect North Barrington’s future snow removal contract with Cuba Township, Pino said.

All four village candidates still have mixed feelings about how the village handled, and ultimately rejected, Taubman Co.’s proposal for a regional mall along Rand Road more than a decade ago. Debate over the project kept North Barrington in the headlines for a few years in the late ‘90s.

Weiner said that while he personally viewed the decision as a missed opportunity, he sees his job as one of doing the will of the people. And it couldn’t have been more clear, he added, that turning down the mall was the will of the people.

Pino lived in North Barrington at the time, but never advocated for or against the mall. The village has done well without it, he said, but added it’s generally preferable for the town to be in control of large pieces of land on its border rather than cede control to a neighboring community or the county.

While retail development in and around Deer Park has made a similar proposal unlikely in North Barrington, those 110 acres are still undeveloped, Pino said. And 12 years of the 20-year boundary agreement with Hawthorn Woods have already been burned up, he added.

So what would the already financially stable North Barrington have done with the sales tax revenue of a large regional mall?

Pino believes it would have changed the nature of the village’s small-town government by requiring the creation of a police department and hiring of a full-time village manager.

Such changes are not envisioned by Pino during his own village presidency, which he expects to last no more than one or two terms. He agrees with Sauer’s philosophy of self-imposed term limits, which is why Sauer said he decided not to seek re-election this year.

“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of any community for anyone to stay in power for a long period of time,” Sauer said.

The three trustees up for re-election — all on the board longer than Pino — said there was no discussion over who would run in Sauer’s place. It was simply a matter of Pino having the most interest, they said.

“He’s been an extremely competent trustee, and all of us have the ultimate confidence in his ability to continue the excellent leadership of President Sauer,” Weiner said.

“I think Al will do a very good job,” Boland agreed. “He’s a very conscientious guy. And I hope that he’s in office for a long time, frankly.”