Referendum overreach
Our local elected officials mostly work hard, prepare well to discuss complex issues, devote long hours and, generally, keep our villages moving ahead.
That is our experience of reporting on village boards, school boards, park boards over decades. Yes. Sometimes they err collectively. Rarely, but always painfully, voters elect a full-on dud — usually someone with an unchecked ego.
The point is our system of local elections works pretty well. And we prefer it, complete with imperfections, to the sugar-candy referendum that former Gov. Pat Quinn and a young mentee just slipped through a silly township program that allows a voter and a few cronies to get darned near any nonsense on a general election ballot.
Quinn, the single-minded — and really his only virtue is being single-minded — populist got 85% of gullible Oak Parkers to approve a referendum on Nov. 5 that again allows a small band of merry men to craft a petition to bring an issue before the village board. If the board does not acquiesce and enact an ordinance in accord with the petitioners, then the issue goes to a binding referendum at the next election.
Majority rules. Sounds good.
But there are moments when elected officials must make hard decisions that would not immediately garner majority support. We look back to Oak Park's early days of integration in the 1960s. Passing a bold fair housing ordinance would not have had the support of a majority of citizens. When the District 97 school board, just a few years later, created middle schools and redrew the attendance boundaries of the eight grade schools, it was not popular. It was the right decision, though, and voters came around to that position over time.
With staggered elections for village offices, voters are never more than two years away from the opportunity to begin reshaping the village board to make a correction the majority feels strongly about.
That is the temperate approach to local governance. And if the national election of a week back tells us anything, it is that we need a more thoughtful and less amped up approach to governing.
