Carpentersville trustee wants to give voters more power
Carpentersville village board members should not have the authority to establish or raise fees, increase the tax levy or create tax increment financing districts without voter approval, one village trustee says.
Because Carpentersville is a home-rule community, trustees have the power to handle those matters without voter input.
But Trustee Doug Marks has drafted an ordinance that, if approved, would repeal that aspect of home rule and give voters the ability to decide taxing matters through a ballot question. Trustees will discuss his proposal Tuesday night.
This was an issue that Marks, a Libertarian, and Trustee Paul Humpfer wanted to take on after they were elected. Humpfer calls himself a fiscal conservative and chairs the village’s audit and finance commission.
Marks is a member of the Fox Valley Libertarian Party who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2010 and belongs to three tea parties, including the Dundee tea party. Humpfer and Marks ran together in the spring elections and Marks’ campaign focused on fiscal responsibility and lower taxes.
Marks pointed to a pair of tax levies within the last two years as examples of out of control spending. The village issued $20 million in bonds last year to pay for street repairs and a public works building, then raised the property tax levy to pay it off. In 2009, officials raised the levy to pay for police pensions, per state requirements.
“I just get so irate to see (that) no matter how you try to explain it, it’s just not understood that the citizens of this town cannot take on the burden of spending,” Marks said. “This is not something I dreamed up. It was something I was asked to do.”
Carpentersville achieved home-rule status in the first place decades ago through referendum.
One of the cornerstones of home-rule powers is the local government’s ability to tax its residents, Village President Ed Ritter said. Approving Marks’ ordinance would be detrimental because it would “hamstring” the village from raising taxes in a crisis and prevent it from adjusting to an adverse economy, Ritter said.
Adding referendums to Carpentersville’s ballots every two years “to turn almost every decision into a referendum-type deal” also doesn’t make sense to him. If residents have an issue with the way any trustee voted, they should sort it out in the voter’s booth, Ritter said.
“The voters elected us to be a representative democracy to make reasonable decisions,” Ritter said. “If they’re not happy with our decisions, they can vote for new people.”