Herald ‘mailed in’ Arlington Hts. picks

I realize that the Daily Herald has a large circulation area and has to limit its coverage of individual local elections, but your endorsements in the Arlington Heights elections are a case study in mailing it in.

In reading your articles endorsing Tom Hayes for mayor and the entire slate of incumbents for the trustee positions, it’s hard not to view them as the Daily Herald endorsing the “business as usual” slate for Arlington Heights.

In the mayor’s race, I think most people would say that Mayor Mulder has had a successful tenure and that Arlington Heights has benefited from her leadership. But there’s something to be said for openness to new ideas and your Hayes endorsement seemed to value not new ideas, but a continuation of the last 20 years, primarily because it’s familiar.

I find this particularly troubling in light of the rather large blind spot Tom Hayes seems to have with regard to conflicts of interest. In two situations, those being the expansion plans of the Free Evangelical Church and more recently the term limit petition, Trustee Hayes chose not to recuse himself in a timely manner in the first case and not at all in the second.

As a member of the church in the first case and as an incumbent in the second, he had a rather direct interest in the outcome of decisions he participated in. Since Trustee Hayes is an attorney I assume he knows the letter of the law and complied in each of these cases, but I think I’d prefer a mayor who wasn’t so comfortable with business as usual that he relied on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.

I think Arlington Heights would benefit from a new mayor who values openness and new ideas and doesn’t have 20 years of business as usual as his primary qualification.

James Fredian

Arlington Heights