THIS STORY WAS UPDATED AT 4:01 P.M. JUNE 2.
An ongoing challenge made to petitions regarding the Community Consolidated School District 15 bond issue has been dropped entirely.
Palatine residents Susan MacDonald and Theodore Grabbe released a statement June 1 through their attorney James Nally.
“Our goal in filing objections to the petition has remained constant — to confirm that all legal requirements for the petition are followed, in particular to ensure that the required number of petition signatures are valid as registered voters in School District 15,” the statement read. “We do not believe that outside influences should have a vote in our local school district affairs.”
The cessation of the challenge will happen officially at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 3 at the electoral board meeting at Sundling Junior High School, 1100 N. Smith St., Palatine. The motion to drop the challenge entirely comes after part of the challenge was dropped May 19.
MacDonald and Grabbe challenged the petition April 19 by claiming that 1,800 of the 7,500 total signatures on the petition were invalid, that the petition was not filed in the allotted 30-day period and that the wording on the petition was not legally sound.
The petition was circulated by a group of District 15 residents and parents and called for a referendum on the bond issue. A records check by the Cook County clerk’s office revealed that only 840 signatures were invalid.
The clerk needed to find more than 1,200 invalid signatures to dismiss the petition entirely.
District 15 resident and attorney Mary Vanek, the principal propenent behind the petitions, said that some invalid signatures are inevitable, but resents the idea that this indicates the influence of outsider on the district’s decision-making.
“It’s just insulting to people who put so much effort into it,” Vanek said. “Yes, we have enough (signatures). We’ve always had enough, but you’re going to find some bad signatures.”
The district was looking to issue $27 million in bonds — about $17 million for capital expenditures and $10 million in working cash.
The district will not pursue the projects it would have funded through the $17 million in bonds, but at its April 14 meeting, the board authorized additional expenditures to cover the costs of some major repairs.
The next district board meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. June 9 at Sundling. The board can decide if it would like to continue to pursue the bond issue through a referendum on the ballot in November.
To read MacDonald and Grabbe’s statement, Vanek’s statement and a statement released by District 54 state represenative candidate Matt Flamm, who organized citizens to check petition signatures, click here.
— By Michelle Stoffel, Triblocal.com reporter
Thank you Ms. Stoffel :)
Well perhaps we should thank the people who actually paid Nally, be it Grabbe, MacDonald or whoever it is. They did the community a great service. That is help to wake up the community that our school districts and school boards really do need diligent monitoring. The bad faith, the unethical actions, the insider deals, the sanctimonious superiority is disgusting. Unless people see it in action they will not pay attention to local elections
Thanks one-of-five – maybe the Triblocal will print MY press release now!
Mary, now that you mention it, this was a pretty one-sided article. I can’t believe that the Trib was unable to reach anybody from the other party. Ms. Stoffel, if you are reading this I believe you owe Mary a one-sided article of her own.
One more thing – Grabbe and MacDonald are silent about the 1,000 plus bogus objections that they made to valid signatures. They say nothing about the signatures of husbands and wives that they claimed were “duplicates”, they are mum about the hundreds of other nonsensical “duplicate” objections that they made that had the County Clerks scratching their heads because they made no sense. They are silent regarding the hundreds of signatures that they hoped to toss out because they claimed, in their omniscience, to have knowledge that the signatures of the circulators were not genuine, or that the circulators did not actually appear before a notary. NO, they are completely silent about the onethousand objections that they made in BAD FAITH. After reviewing the petitions and finding no more that 800 invalid signatures, Flamm’s Flunkies should have thrown in the towel and called it a day. But, no, they had to go and fabricate a thousand more objections just to make us work like dogs and spend money on attorneys defending the good signatures. TIs too bad that the Trib gave them a platform to publish their disingenuous PR.
After reading Grabbe and MacDonald’s self-serving press release, you would think that we had bused in SEIU members from Chicago to circulate and sign the petition, when in fact most of the signatures that were invalidated were by people who lived in District 15 boundaries but were not actually registered to vote at the address listed. I personally looked at every single objection and I recall seeing a couple of signatures from people who lived in the wrong part of Hoffman Estates (District 54) one person from Mount Prospect and one from Wheeling who signed. Its too bad that nobody from the Trib called us to get the other side of the story. But that’s OK – Flamm’s Flunkies continue to alienate the thousands of living, breathing, registered voters who actually signed the petition. Keep up the good work!
If you ask me the Palatine Democrats found out ahead of time how the vote was going to go and then tried to spin the story like they were the honorable ones. Also, to point out, Nally’s comment “Finally, we reiterate that we believe it is essential that decision making in matters of our schools be limited solely to the School District 15 school board and its citizens.” (emphasize, AND ITS CITIZENS). Why then did they fight a petition to deprive ITS CITIZENS of their right to vote on this important issue?