Via Rich in the Courier News
Months of hard work and jockeying for position came down to the wire Tuesday night, but when the final results were posted it was clear that high school athletics scored a huge victory in Dundee Unit School District 300.
With the passage of the education tax rate referendum by less than 1,000 votes of the over 23,000 ballots cast, Dundee-Crown, Jacobs and Hampshire avoided the threatened loss of all extracurricular programs ? including sports ? as a way to meet the district’s budgetary demands. The referendum’s passage will increase the maximum annual tax rate from 2.7 to 3.25 percent.
It would appear the entire post by Rich is a nice jab at the fine Roeser political machine (and entirely with merit)
Interesting that they had to resort to threatening high school sports to get the tax hike through. That was the Ace in the Hole in Pleasant Plains, IL, a few years back.
I’m not judging this one way or the other. But, when you can’t win on the merits, threaten extracurricular activities ie. hurt the students’ chances at getting into a better college or an atheletic scholarship and the parents will knuckle under. It’s not a very pretty way to win.
I also have noticed that when extracurricular fees are threatened unless you vote for the tax hike, that once the tax hike passes the fees come anyway. If I were running for the statehouse up in the burbs, I’d make that part of my campaign.
That the Carpentersville District 300 tax hike committee put on a $200,000 campaign versus the $17,000 Jack Roeser said he spent probably ought to be worked into the analysis.
I documented the $200,000 here. (It was mainly from developers, with some from vendors.) Roeser told the Northwest Herald that he spent $17,000, but we won’t know for sure until the July campaign disclosure reports.
Again, I won’t know about this spending item until the reports are in, but odds are pretty good that the St. Louis firm referendum campaign consulting firm was heavily involved.
It was a good, grass-roots campaign on the proponents’ side, but one of the opponents did document school employee sign stealing with photos I ran the end of last week.