Lake County Board Wakes Up to New Partisan Reality

After years of many Lake County Board members playing go-along-to-get-along with their fellow Democratic Board members, it appears that as a result of the tactics used by the Lake County Dems in the recent election, the GOP members of the Board appear to have finally realized that they are in the cross-hairs.

Not all GOP Board members have had a history of playing footsie with the Dems. And I don't mean to suggest that the good of the county has to play second fiddle to partisan politics--far from it, in fact. The Lake County Board has historically been fairly free of partisan bickering, but that's largely because the Dems were pretty much powerless, being a small minority. Now, thanks to pulling within a few votes of gaining the majority, the Dems find themselves on the losing end of a partisan war, with Board member Angelo Kyle losing his vice-president's seat on the Forest Preserve Board (by law, the members of the Lake County Board and the Forest Board are the same, they just juggle the officer positions around). State Rep. Eddie Washington is probably laughing somewhere at Kyle's misfortune.

Suzi Schmidt was re-elected unanimously as County Chairman (no opponent), and my buddy David Stolman was elected vice-chairman. Interestingly, Stolman was one of the few county board incumbents who took the Dem challengers to task for misleading campaign literature that made unsubstantiated claims of 'sweeheart deals' and corruption in the county, and misstated the county board's role and involvement in setting property tax levels. Stolman, who pushed back, won his election by a comfortable margin, but other some other long-time GOP board members who did not take a strong stand against the Dem tactics did not return. We should note that the County Board carnage might have been even worse had Dan Venturi and the Lake County GOP not managed to knock a few would-be Dem opponents off the ballot through nomination challenges.

The writing now appears to be on the wall for the GOP members of the County Board. Terry Link and Michael Bond came for you last election, and there are now four less of you. They are coming again, especially Bond, who is up for re-election and seems to have taken the role of candidate recruiting director for the Lake County Dems. Even Suzi Schmidt, who is friends with Terry Link's wife, seems to have figured out that she is not immune from the Dem onslaught, and spent a lot of time this last election campaigning for Linda Pedersen of Antioch (who won the seat vacated by Judy Martini). Schmidt will have to do even more this next election to preserve her majority and her chairmanship, but I think she and the rest of the GOP are up to the task, now that reality has set in.