McHenry Times

With a newly all-but-elected Algonquin Township Highway Commissioner not from a family that held that office for more than a half-century, co-hosts of a Chicago-based conservative radio talk show recently reflected on the race they said amounted to the state writ small.

"Not something you'd think would normally capture the imagination of the region but it kinda-sorta did," Dan Proft said during a recent edition of Illinois Rising in conversation with co-host Pat Hughes. "Because it was such an egregious example of the kleptocracy that pervades Illinois."

Illinois' Daley political family has nothing on the family of out-going and long-time Algonquin Township Highway Commissioner Robert Miller, Proft said.

"His grandfather was the highway commissioner, his father was the highway commissioner, he's been the highway commissioner for 24 years, that's 52 years in the family," he said. "He hires family members. He, his wife, his two sons in law, with $400 grand in salary from the highway department in Algonquin Township, which has responsibility for about 50 miles of township road."

Proft and Hughes are co-founders of the Illinois Opportunity Project. Proft, in addition to hosting Illinois Rising, is Liberty Principles PAC chairperson and treasurer, as well as a senior fellow at the Chicago-based conservative think tank Illinois Policy Institute. Illinois Rising is a presentation of the Illinois Policy Institute.

In a race already heated by allegations of nepotism, a YouTube video that showed Algonquin Township Highway Department employees behaving very badly made the election all the more ugly and help oust Miller in February's Consolidated Elections.

Miller was defeated by Andrew Gasser, a McHenry County Board member and chairman of the Algonquin Township Republican Party, by 145 votes. The margin was 51.5 percent of the 5,401 voters who participated in February's Republican primary. Gasser is unopposed in the April 4 election, so he has effectively already won.

The race between Gasser and Miller became especially ugly shortly before the election when a video turned up on YouTube that appeared to show Algonquin Township Highway Department employees shooting up a junked car on what also appeared to be township property. It has become a last-minute electoral headache for longtime incumbent Miller. While the video had been shot in 2009, Gasser maintained it was proof was unfit for his office.

“I wonder how the McHenry County Conservation District feels about the Algonquin Township employees setting up a dangerously unsafe, uncertified firing range where ricochets could enter their property, endangering life and contaminating environmentally sensitive land?" Gasser said in a statement published in the Northwest Herald shortly after the video surfaced. "Thank God no one was hurt in this reckless incident.”

Miller claimed on his Facebook page that he contacted one of the employees in the video, who he said "was let go some time ago" and that former employee told him the video had been shot after work hours more than a decade ago on the property of a nearby gravel company. That property, then, was not township property, Miller said in that post.

"Obviously, that does not make it any more appropriate," Miller said in his Facebook post.

The video has since been removed from YouTube.

"There's two things that were going on there," Hughes said during the same Illinois Rising broadcast. "So, when you're in power for 50-plus years, you don't think anybody's watching, you think you are beyond the voter and your responsibility is only to your family and your friends and yourself. That's why you turn township property into a shooting range."

The voters decided that enough was enough.

"This is a message, Dan, to everyone at every level of government that this type of stuff is being watched and isn't going to be tolerated anymore," Hughes said.