DuPage County Forest Preserve District President Dewey Pierotti licked his index finger as he flipped through the pages of a report dealing with the possible expansion of West Bartlett Road from Illinois Highway 59 west to Spitzer Road.
Pierotti (R-Addison) was interested in the plan because the work would take place north of Pratt’s Wayne Woods Forest Preserve near Wayne. The preserve has become a battleground between himself and County Board Chairman Robert Schillerstrom. More than a year ago, Schillerstrom proposed expanding a road through the preserve, an idea Pierotti has vehemently opposed.
Even though Schillerstrom has said publicly there are no longer plans for a road expansion, Pierotti has brought up the issue whenever roadwork is proposed near the woods.
So, as Pierotti looked through the report and asked what, if any, impact the project would have on Pratt’s Wayne Woods, it didn’t take long for Schillerstrom to bark him down.
“There are no plans to build a road through the forest preserves,” Schillerstrom said in a raised voice during Tuesday’s County Board meeting.
“That’s written in stone?” Pierotti said.
“We can say it a few more times if necessary for you to get it,” Schillerstrom said before ending the exchange of words.
In recent months, Pierotti and Schillerstrom have had differences of opinion on a variety of topics, including whether the Forest Preserve District should continue to buy open land in the county, as Schillerstrom wants, or wait a few years to finish its current land acquisitions, as Pierotti has said.
The two also have disagreed over how elections should be held when the Forest Preserve Commission and County Board become separate governmental entities in 2002.
But the road expansion was one of the first public disagreements between the two. During early debates over the issue last year, Pierotti sent out a strongly worded press release opposing even a study of that project. The proposal was eventually dropped.
On Tuesday, Pierotti eventually voted for the West Bartlett Road project, but it’s unlikely that will quell the disagreements between the two.
“This has been brewing for some time,” said a County Board member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “And I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
Author-in-waiting: If and when he writes a book about the recent history of an Illinois prison system out of control and how it has begun to be reformed, state Rep. Tom Johnson (R-West Chicago) said nobody will believe it.
That’s because the seaminess and corruption of the system at its nadir is astonishing, albeit well-documented.
As co-chairman of the General Assembly’s Special House Committee on Prison Management Reform, Johnson has had a front-row seat in the drive to reform Illinois prisons, a movement triggered in 1996 by the broadcast of the infamous Richard Speck videotapes. Shot in 1988, the videotapes depict convicted killer Speck living a life of sex and drugs in Stateville prison.
After about 20 years of gang control in the prisons, beginning with the so-called Pontiac prison riot in 1978, Illinois only recently has regained the upper hand in prison management, Johnson said. He said the system can begin to focus on the issue of reducing the number of repeat offenders, a mainstay of the prison population.
Johnson provided area voters with a sort of synopsis of his possible book during a recent candidates forum in Geneva.
“The prison system is a very different place than it was five years ago,” Johnson said, after giving a G-rated description of the seaminess of and danger in the system when gangs boldly controlled prison operations.
“I’ll write a book about this someday. The public would not believe where we were four years ago. Virtually every [prison] program was a gang meeting point,” he said.
Johnson, an attorney, is being challenged Nov. 7 by Democrat Steve Bruesewitz of St. Charles.
Coming up: The League of Women Voters of Batavia is hosting forums on Monday and Thursday.
Monday’s forum will feature candidates for Congress, the legislature and Kane County offices and is set for 7 p.m. in the Batavia Municipal Center, 101 N. Island Ave. Thursday’s forum, at the same starting time and place, is to focus on funding for the proposed Webster Street to 1st Street bridge. A non-binding resolution on preservation of open space next to the Braeburn Marsh also is on the agenda.
Million-dollar omelets: Pierotti and other county forest preserve commissioners held a special by-invitation-only breakfast this week for state legislators, including Senate President James “Pate” Philip (R-Wood Dale), to thank them for the government pork that the district has received over the years.
Besides omelets and coffee, those in attendance dined on, what else, sausage.
More than $15 million has come the district’s way in recent years for such projects as refurbishing the Peabody Mansion at the Mayslake Forest Preserve near Oak Brook to reconfiguring the district’s golf courses.
Next election: Lisle Trustee Joseph Broda is making moves to become the village’s next mayor. Broda plans to spend the weekend gathering the 207 petition signatures needed to run in April against incumbent Mayor Ronald Ghilardi.
