Chicago Tribune
September 17, 2004
Chairman Mike McCoy takes a look back on his 12 years on the County Board
By William Presecky
Tribune staff reporter
Pressed into service in July 1992 to fill an unexpired term on the Kane County Board, Mike McCoy said he quickly
found the work interesting and fun.
As he prepares to leave office Dec. 1 after serving two terms as chairman, the 48-year-old Republican from Aurora
said he still finds his government job interesting but "not as much fun."
Since losing a school board election in 1986, McCoy has been elected four times and opposed only twice for county
office since 1994. The last time he faced political opposition was in 1996, when he won a three-way GOP primary
for board chairman.
More than a year ago, McCoy surprised many when he quietly announced that he would not seek a third term as chairman.
Since then, he said, he has become increasingly convinced that his decision to retire from partisan politics was
the right one.
"I've been on the board 12 years, and that's long enough. I've learned a lot," said McCoy, who put his
civil engineering career on hold to work full time as chairman. "The bottom line is I never wanted to be a
career politician."
McCoy has no firm plans when he leaves his $81,000-a-year post, but politics is out. "I don't see myself running
for major elective office again," he said.
"I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm looking at some jobs. My ultimate goal is to be in the classroom teaching
some day," said McCoy, a longtime volunteer football coach at Kaneland High School in Maple Park.
Working with kids has "helped temper my cynicism," he said. "It's the only time for 2 1/2 hours
that I can completely forget the county."
Although McCoy said he long ago stopped being bothered by it, the baseless but unavoidable linkage of his name
with an ethics gaffe by Kane County State's Atty. Meg Gorecki will forever be a footnote of his tenure, he conceded.
Before her election, Gorecki was caught making a fictitious claim of a political kickback scheme allegedly involving
McCoy. Gorecki's law license was suspended for a time this year as a result of the lapse.
McCoy said the long-running Gorecki scandal played no part in his decision not to run again.
Political backlash, however, from McCoy's outspoken opposition to U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert's push for
an expressway corridor through far western Kane did factor into his decision "somewhat," he conceded.
And the so-called outer-belt proposal to initially connect Interstate Highways 80 and 88 continues to rankle him,
McCoy said.
In a spirited address last month at a rally in Big Rock Township, he lambasted the proposal, calling it "a
joke [that] makes zero sense."
"I hope 100 years from now someone will look back and say, `Wow, those people around the turn of the [21st]
Century were smart. They protected this beautiful land. They fought the good fight, and they didn't let it happen,"
he said. "It's very clear why it's here. It's here for one person, one very powerful person. Hastert.
"It's been a pleasure to oppose this. For me, it's an issue of right and wrong. It's that simple."
When he staked out that position almost three years ago, the camaraderie and cooperative character of the Kane
board's GOP majority that McCoy had engendered began to erode, said veteran board member Caryl VanOvermeiren (R-St.
Charles), a McCoy ally.
"With his strong opinion on the bypass road, some of the board members saw him out ahead of them--way out
ahead," said VanOvermeiren.
"Then we had another election [in 2002], and the complexion of the board changed just enough that it tilted
things," she said.
On balance, however, VanOvermeiren said McCoy "was a very good chairman. He is a good chairman. He got a lot
accomplished."
In addition to greatly improving the county's fiscal soundness, McCoy also has overseen the successful redistribution
of roughly $70 million in casino profits countywide since 1997 for an array of environmental, economic development
and education projects and programs.
McCoy cites adoption of Kane's nationally acclaimed 2020 Land Use Plan as his "greatest sense of accomplishment
and the board's biggest accomplishment."
"When I became chairman, it became my mission to champion that plan. In some ways it made my job easy. It
really served as my platform," McCoy said.
"A lot of different, significant programs have flowed out of it: storm-water protection, open-space acquisition,
farmland protection," he said. "When I leave office, we will have protected more than 3,000 acres [of
farmland]. With all the applications we have now, we could spend $30 million if we had it.
"My biggest disappointment is that, when challenged with the outer-belt freeway, the board went lukewarm on
their own [land-use] plan. They didn't stand behind it," he said.
"Kane has a history of being a transitional area from urban to rural. If we let that get away from us, 50
years from now we'll lose our identity," McCoy said.
McCoy, who was the only the second chairman to be elected countywide after the board stopped voting on its chairman,
said he makes no apologies for bucking Hastert.
"Everything I've ever done or stance I've taken is what I think is best for citizens and my constituents,
not who's for it or who's against it," McCoy said.
"A tiff with the speaker of the House absolutely is a weakness politically, and I really didn't want to get
into a big political fight. I just didn't like the tone and the nature of the campaign that I saw coming,"
McCoy said.
Board member Karen McConnaughay (R-St. Charles), the 2004 GOP nominee for board chairman, who is aligned with Hastert
on the parkway proposal, said speculation whether she would have opposed McCoy will have to remain speculation.
"I had heard that he wasn't running and had been encouraged to think about running," said McConnaughay,
who says she was still exploring her political options when McCoy announced his decision to step down.
McConnaughay chalked up the increased separation that has occurred between McCoy and some of his former board allies,
including herself, to what she described as an evolution in "the challenges that the county is facing"
as well as a change in philosophies on how to meet them.