There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. ― Robert A. Heinlein,
And when you consider the variety of Kane and DuPage County boards I’ve covered over the past 16 years, that title is really sayin’ somethin’! So, since this is gonna be another long one, let’s dispense with the formalities and get right to the always amazing antics foisted upon us by the herd of cats otherwise known as the current Kane County Board.
Vern Teppe has a terrible case of amnesia!
It would seem some of them have no clue they’re being videotaped because this board gaggle harbors a rather strange propensity to say the darndest things! (Look up the reference!) Take Vern Teppe, for example! Vern, a man we’ve previously defined as no threat to MENSA, remotely stood before the Finance Committee and said, “I find it disturbing that for the past 10 years there has been no increase in property taxes.”
Really? Disturbing?
I don’t know about you, but I find it quite comforting that previous Kane County Boards had the too-rare good sense to keep the tax levy flat while they maintained series of balanced budgets. C’mon! Isn’t that the kind of fiscal responsibility we should expect from all of our local governing bodies?
Not nearly finished, Teppe went on to claim those forgone tax hikes were the sole cause of the County’s current $16 million deficit. Really? You mean COVID had absolutely nothing to do with it? I’m just taking a shot in the dark here, but I’d hazard a guess that Vern’s never taken an accounting class.
Teppe capped off his glorious oration by declaring this “lapse” was, “A failure on the part of this board to really do its fiduciary responsibility in taking care of things.” Then he asked his compatriots, “So, why are we afraid to raise taxes…let’s put this back in the budget right now!”
And this is where his tragic case of amnesia comes in, because Vern somehow forgot he’s a duly elected county board member, and as a duly elected Kane County Board member, he could introduce a resolution or amendment that would put a property tax hike to a full-board vote at their very next meeting.
So, why hasn’t he done just that? Oh! That’s easy! Vern wants someone else to make the motion because if some ne’er-do-well journalist (like me, for example) ties him to those tax increase declarations at election time, he’ll have virtually no chance of being reelected.
Of course, I’d never do something like that…would I?
The slow drip of local taxation
In his heroic pounding-his-shoe-on-the-desk let’s-raise-property-taxes speech (Look up the shoe pounding reference!), Vern described how a scant 1.4 percent county tax increase will only cost him four bucks and he “can readily afford four dollars.”
Yeah Vern, but can your senior citizen neighbor who counts on Social Security simply to survive afford it? And what if we go back to the McConnaughay era where annual 1.4 percent tax hikes were the norm? That adds up to $60 over the course of those ten years which makes it even more difficult for your fixed income neighbor to afford it.
But getting back to Vern’s unfortunate amnesia, he also seems to have forgotten that Kane County is not nearly our only taxing entity. To wit, in my case:
- The City of Geneva inevitably tries to sneak by a $50 to $150 annual tax increase
- The Geneva School Board regularly picks our pockets for an extra $100 to $300 a year
- Vern and his Democratic board friends will soon raise the County’s gas tax from two to four cents a gallon at a time when gas prices are going through the roof.
- The State is persistently trying to tax its way out of insolvency
- And then there are all the subversive state/county/municipal fee increases that can be even worse than tax hikes
So, please tell me, why is raising taxes ALWAYS a county board member’s first thought? It would seem that they can’t even say the phrase “budge cut.”
Because it’s exactly this kind of short sightedness and entitlement mentality that drives me and my fellow taxpayers fuckin’ nuts. “It’s only four bucks,” right? Yeah Vern, but it’s not your four bucks so please keep your flippin’ filthy hand out of my goddam pocket when there are clearly better options.
The truly ironic thing is all these new Kane County fee and tax increases overly affect the marginalized people that those same Democrats sanctimoniously purport to represent.
Like the proverbial broken clock…
…Teppe had to be right about something, and he was right when he said something I’ve been writing about for years. Kane County frequently pays their employees so poorly that we’ve become the training ground for the surrounding Collar Counties.
And that’s particularly true of our prosecutors and public defenders who head for the greener pastures of DuPage and Kendall Counties the second they build a reasonable track record here. Worse yet, the KC Health Department can’t hire new nurses at their absurd $15 an hour when local hospitals and health care facilities are offering them a $10,000 signing bonus.
But again, why does the first “answer” always have to be “Let’s raise taxes!” You mean to tell me there’s no fat in a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar budget? I can come up with a number of possibilities right off the top of my head!
It’s become abundantly clear that the five-million-dollar a year Workforce Development Division has become a patronage-based boondoggle of epic proportion. They don’t even bother filing the regularly required State reports. That department could easily be eliminated and replaced with something that actually works for half the cost.
I’ve also previously written about our bloated judiciary at length, and with the Zoom era fully upon us, there’s no need for nearly as many court security officers, bailiffs, Circuit Clerk employees, and the patronage hires that many of the judges (John Dalton e.g.) use to build their own personal fiefdoms. Put more simply, particularly when you consider the State pays those hefty judicial salaries, there’s absolutely no reason the judiciary should be demanding 18 percent of the general fund in this lightspeed digital era.
What about the Chairman’s and Auditor’s propensity to hire unnecessary consultants because they lack the background and experience to do their jobs? And after Chairman Pierog hired more than one redistricting consultant, she summarily ignored all their advice.
And speaking of automation, with the appropriate software improvements, the Recorders office staff could easily be cut in half.
Then there’s this! The main reason I worked with Sheriff Ron Hain during his election effort is his capacity to comprehend how an ounce of crime/recidivism prevention is worth more than 20 pounds of cure. But the problem with implementing some of Ron’s more innovative programs is those long-term fiscal returns are only possible after an initial budget bump.
Worse yet, whenever a politician takes on a public safety budget – 50 percent of the Kane County General Fund – they’re automatically perceived as being soft on crime. Perhaps a county board with some real cojones could see both the trees and the forest in this regard and actually do something about it.
Regardless, there are a plethora of options to find that competitive salary money and increased taxation should ALWAYs be a last resort.
Wow! I thought I’d cover all the fascinating Board antics in one fell swoop, but there are so many of ‘em we’ll have to end it here and move on to a part two on Thursday where we’ll discuss:
- How the Democrats are going on a hiring, spending, and taxation spree in the COVID era
- How the Chairman and Board STILL haven’t distributed a cent from the second round of COVID relief funds
- How the Board is trying to keep 96 percent of those relief funds for themselves
- How the Chronicle couldn’t craft a FOIA request if their lives depended on it
Until then!
