Mike McCoy had made up his mind. After months of wavering, he had decided he would not be a candidate for the Republican nomination for Kane County Board chairman in 1996.
That was what he told fellow County Board Member Jim Mitchell (R-North Aurora) during a golf outing about seven months before the March primary.
Yet within hours of walking off the 18th green, a heated coversation among a group of GOP county officials in the parking lot sent McCoy into another 180-degree turn.
Kane County government was caught in a state of constant bickering, moving every direction but forward, McCoy thought as he listened to the argument. He figured he was the one man who could reach for consensus, among the 26 County Board members and throughout one of Illinois’ fastest-growing counties.
“Nothing happened in particular, but I felt at the end of that day that I could successfully win a campaign,” said McCoy, 40. “I felt I could make a difference, that it was an important job.”
With the cautious support of his father, former Aurora Mayor Albert McCoy, his wife, Vicki, and a core group of board members, McCoy won a three-way Republican primary to succeed Warren Kammerer (R-St.Charles), who is retiring after six years as chairman.
Democrats praised McCoy’s consensus-building skills and made no effort to field a general election candidate.
“Mike realized how divided and polarized parts of government had become,” said Doug Weigand (R-Batavia), a County Board member who had taken part in that after-golf argument. “He could see a need to bring various people together and get government moving.”
It was not the first time McCoy had thought of running. He was so depressed and angry in early 1995 when Kammerer removed him as chairman of the board’s influential Transportation Committee that he began thinking about mounting a campaign to unseat the chairman. At the time, Kammerer had not yet announced his retirement.
McCoy went through another bad patch after the board ignored his plan for a cheaper alternative to a failed $51 million bond issue that would have greatly expanded the overcrowded Kane County Jail. That episode made him doubt his skills.
“I hit a real low point. I was starting to question myself,” McCoy said. “But I’m glad I worked through all of that. Now I see a real exciting job opportunity with people who really want to move forward.”
“Ever since he’s been on the board, people have seen how easy he is to work with, how he looks at the whole picture,” Vicki McCoy said. “He was already making a really good reputation for himself, with how he treated people and worked with people.”
Caryl VanOvermeiren knew little about McCoy when she won a board seat in 1992, a few months after McCoy was appointed to fill a vacancy created by the resignation of one-time County Board Chairman Frank Miller. But the two quickly became allies.
“It soon became evident to me that he had qualities of leadership that we need in this county,” said VanOvermeiren (R-St. Charles), who is expected to seek the board’s vice chairmanship next month.
“We became part of a group that could call each other and explain different things to each other,” she said. “It was a good exchange because we recognized it was OK to acknowledge our need for more knowledge.”
McCoy believes the skills he has acquired during 18 years of engineering will come in handy after he takes the oath of office for the $60,000-a-year job on Dec. 2. McCoy has sold his Aurora company and plans to devote full-time attention to the chairman’s job.
With decisions on road projects, building expansions, storm-water management and disposition of solid waste all looming, McCoy believes he is changing offices more than he is changing jobs.
“I don’t think I’m changing fields,” McCoy said. He has a background in construction and project management and connections with contractors, unions and large labor forces, he said, experience that “fits in well with what I’ll be doing in the county.”
McCoy, who has lived in Aurora almost all his life, was 9 years old when his father began his 12-year reign as the city’s mayor. There was no way, Mike thought, that he would follow in Albert McCoy’s political footsteps.
“I hated the public spotlight. It’s true–I’d hide in the corner,” McCoy said.
Instead he married his high school sweetheart, fathered three children and worked for a variety of engineering companies before opening his own firm in 1993.
And, except for a failed bid for the West Aurora school board and minimal work as an assistant precinct committeeman, McCoy had expressed little interest in politics until 1992. That’s when Miller, who was about to leave the County Board to become a commissioner of the Regional Transportation Authority, approached McCoy about taking over the seat he was giving up.
“I had planned at some point to do something, but I wasn’t quite sure what,” McCoy said. “When I would read the paper and complain about this and that, my wife kept pushing me that if I was going to complain, I might as well get in there and do something.”
