Bill Maio wants to be the next DuPage County coroner.
But if county GOP leaders have any sense as they vote Saturday on who should fill an unexpected vacancy as the Republican nominee for the office, they’ll ensure that never happens.
Maio, to say the least, is a controversial guy. The DuPage County Board member has been praised for being hardworking and fiscally prudent. But Maio’s also considered a hothead and concedes he’s “not the most highly-polished guy in the world.”
Maio resigned from his position as a deputy coroner for natural disasters in 1986 shortly after he was discovered to have been carrying a concealed weapon.
State Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale), who’s also the DuPage Republican chairman, said Maio has been waving a check for $50,000 at committee meetings, calling it “a down payment on the cost of my race” to be deposited into county GOP coffers in exchange for the nomination. Maio confirmed that account to the Tribune.
Maio says the position of coroner is administrative, as in, “You don’t have to have any prequalifications.” Fortunately for county GOP leaders, they do have someone with “prequalifications”–Deputy Coroner Pete Siekmann, who has 28 years of experience. Siekmann enjoys an excellent reputation among DuPage law enforcement for being knowledgeable, sensitive in dealing with families who have suffered losses, and thorough in conducting investigations.
DuPage Sheriff John Zaruba is urging support of Siekmann, as is State’s Atty. Joseph Birkett. So are more than 500 DuPage police officers who signed a petition backing him.
But standing in the way of such an obvious choice is County Board Chairman Bob Schillerstrom, who has been strong-arming committeemen into supporting his longtime crony and political henchman, Maio.
It sounds positively … Cook County.
Mr. Schillerstrom, are you lost?
Schillerstrom has cooked up a bogus budget issue to make his argument that what the office needs is a good administrator who can mind the books rather than someone who already knows how to be, well, a coroner.
Running the county coroner’s office is not exactly like managing Microsoft Corp. It has 14 employees and a budget of just over $1 million. Big whoop. If the coroner’s office has budget problems, it should take any semicompetent accounting major about a day to fix.
This political squabble has reached such heights that the Democratic challenger in the November coroner’s race, usually a martyr or hopeless dreamer trapped in GOP country, has started licking his chops. But somehow even Michael Kisler, a former licensed funeral director and paramedic running for coroner as a Democrat, managed to cut through the politics enough to practically endorse Siekmann, potentially the more formidable opponent, whom he called “hands down the best deputy coroner in the state of Illinois.”
Your move, DuPage Republicans.
