With campaign season right around the corner, local elected officials are sharing what motivated their interest in public office and what people can expect if they decided to run during a panel discussion hosted by the League of Women Voters of the La Grange Area.
A panel including retiring La Grange Trustee Beth Augustine and Western Springs village President Heidi Rudolph participated in the Basics of Running For Office forum recently at the La Grange Public Library.
About 40 interested people turned out to hear from the panel, which also included Brookfield Trustee Nicole Gilhooley and Lyons Township High School District 204 Trustee Shawn Kennedy.
“I grew up watching public service happen in this town,” Augustine said, pointing out that her mother also was a La Grange trustee. “For any of you who have been here for a while, it looks pretty snazzy right now … but it doesn’t come easy, it doesn’t just happen.
“My mom was part of a generation of community members who saw a need to reinvigorate this town (to be) like Western Springs and Brookfield. Any town in America, when the malls came, that really devastated small downtowns. That was the first punch; the second was online shopping. It’s really hard to keep a small community vibrant in the retail area.”
Rudolph, who became the acting village president of Western Springs when former President Alice Gallagher died in 2023, also discussed her mother’s influence.
“It was all because of my mom,” Rudolph said of her foray into elected office. “When I was a kid my mom ran for McClean County Board. She worked full time as a pharmacist, she had two kids in grade school, and she decided to run for elected office. It was pretty unusual.
“I had to go to the board meetings when I was 8, which I thought was awful. But obviously it had an impact on me, and her overall commitment to community and local government became a part of who I was.”
Each official who spoke talked about their individual paths to elected office.
“I ran for office the first time in 2013,” Gilhooley said, adding that she sat out one term before running again. “Prior to running for office, I did sit on a village commission — a beautification commission in Brookfield, which runs a number of sustainability projects, beautifying the village in different ways.”
Kennedy, the LTHS board member, said before running he was told that it would only be one meeting a month, which drew laughs from the other panelists and the audience.
“It is a time commitment,” he said.
The forum also featured attorneys Ronette McCarthy and Tyler Smith, who walked the audience through the technical process of getting on the ballot in various municipalities and in the state in general.
They covered the basics, beginning with the election and campaign finance calendar, how to navigate the nominating process, common areas of confusion, how to assemble the packet for ballot access, filing dates, how to defend against objections, and social media rules for candidates.
While only a couple of audience members expressed a definite interest in running for elected office, the elected officials let everyone know that running can be a challenging undertaking.
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Kennedy said. “Knocking on doors when it was cold … I think the minimum was 100 (nominating) signatures at that time. Everybody was telling me get 120, get 130, get 150, I didn’t quite understand what they said is true.”
But he stressed that there was no need to get thousands of signatures for a race that only required 100.
One audience member asked about handling negative input from residents, saying “I’m sure you get snarked at, yelled at, your kids get snarked at or yelled at, or worse social media just rips though you. … How do you deal with that personal negativity?”
“You just don’t let it bother you,” Kennedy said. “Because deep down, at the end of the day, every board I’ve been on, the decision that I made, I’ve always said to myself, is it best for the community? Is it in the end a hard decision, a hard vote to say yes or no? If I do that, I sleep with my head on the pillow every night and I don’t worry about what people say.”
Hank Beckman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
