A conversation with Lois Swatscheno, candidate for Elgin Township Board Clerk
The following interview excerpts have been edited for clarity and flow with Lois’ approval.
What is your professional experience?
I’ve been retired for 10 years – I was lucky enough to be able to retire early – but before that I worked for close to 40 years in telecommunications engineering. The last 26 years I worked for Office Max at their headquarters in Naperville, and about the last 15 years of that I was a manager, and I managed 8 highly technical engineers. We were responsible for all of the voice telecommunications for the entire enterprise – and that was six very large call centers, the two headquarters buildings, about 1,200 stores and distribution centers. So the eight of us had a lot to be responsible for.
At one time I also managed the data group, but both groups got too big, so we split it into two. The last two years that I was there, I reported directly to a senior vice president, and I managed his budget, which was a 24 million dollars annual budget. I helped him create it every year, I reported on it to him every month, and I worked with all of his managers and directors to make sure that they stayed within budget. And we did. We always did.
How did you become politically involved?
When I retired, I pictured a completely different life. I intended to volunteer my time at various community organizations, and I still do that, but not to the extent that I originally planned. But after the 2016 election I couldn’t just sit back anymore, and you know, take things that were happening for granted. I had to do something about it.
So I just started going to as many meetings as I could find. I want to Indivisible meetings. I went to the Women’s March meetings. I went to the Women’s March in Washington, DC. And when I came back, it was like, Oh, my God! I was on fire because of that. That was just an amazing experience. I mean, I wish it had even more effect than it did, but to see all these people, men, women, children didn’t matter, they were all there, and everybody was getting along. We were there for the same reason.
So I became politically active with the Democrats – both township and county, and to a certain extent to the State.
I am a founding member of the Kane County Democratic Women. I’m currently their treasurer, and I’ve been an officer from the very start. Corinne Pierog is the current county board chair, and she was the person who first got us all together, and when we first started we were ten women who met in a Panera in Batavia, and now we have 145 paid members of this organization all throughout the county. We encourage our members to run for office. We give financial support, we write letters, postcards, have meet and greets – we do a lot of things to get our candidates out there. Since this organization came to be in 2018, we have gotten probably 40 to 45 women, and some men, elected to office from our group.
I am a director for the Elgin League of Women Voters. My responsibility for them is voter registration, so I coordinate events. I do a lot of other things with the League, but that’s my primary function. The event at South Elgin High School is our favorite, because our teacher there always gets a big showing. We’ll register anywhere from a hundred to 250 students in a single day.
Why are you running for Elgin Township clerk?
I am a mother of two adult, very hardworking, twin women. And part of the reason I’m doing this, running for office, is because of them.
I had more rights at their age than they do now, and I think that’s wrong.
I’ll give you an example. One of my girls had a baby two years ago, and she traveled for work. She had to plan her travel so that she was never in a state where, if something were to happen to her, she would bleed to death in a parking lot. So she wouldn’t go to Ohio. She wouldn’t go to Indiana. She wouldn’t go to Kentucky. She wanted this baby very much, and we enjoy the heck out of him, but a person shouldn’t have to do that. They shouldn’t have to worry about “am I gonna die if something goes wrong?”
I know that I’m not on the state or the national level. I know that I cannot affect those laws, but what I can do, working for the township, is help us get services to all our residents, and not just some of them.
If you’re elected as clerk, what are your top priorities for your first year?
My highest priority, if I’m elected, is to provide transparency to all of our residents. Currently, you can watch the meetings via live stream, but they’re not posted anywhere. If you’re not streaming at that particular moment. You don’t get to see it. So we would like to not only livestream it, but then post it on the Elgin township website so that you can go back and hear anything anybody said.
Another thing that they don’t do today is post the agenda and financial packets online for everybody to see. And we’re pretty like minded amongst all of us [the Democrats running for Elgin Township Board] in that we want all of our residents to know what’s going on. We want them to know what financial commitments we make, what kind of money we have, how we are spending it. They don’t do that today. I couldn’t tell you, I mean, you can’t find it.
As a clerk I’m not a voting member, but another priority will be to support those board members in the things that they want to accomplish. And that means taking good notes and helping craft the agendas. Posting meeting minutes is what the clerk is primarily responsible for – recording the minutes and making sure that they’re recorded in a timely fashion.
As a group [the Democrats running for Elgin Township Board], one of the things we want to do is have some event that would bring some of the community together at least once a quarter. So, for instance, we might have a Senior Citizen Day where we bring different groups together, and let senior citizens come in and find out what’s available. Or something on housing to help educate people about their opportunities to have a better place to live, or a place to live at all.
So even though I’m not a voting member of the board, I see us working together in collaboration and trying to get these events to take off, and hopefully have value to our residents.
And I can’t stress it enough – all residents.
You know that the atmosphere that we have today is so toxic that they would leave people out if they could. And they will. I don’t want to leave anybody out. Even if you cannot vote, you should still be able to communicate with us your needs.
Picturing yourself in four years, if elected, how will you know if your term was successful?
One of the things would be how were we able to engage the people who live here? Did they come to our events? Did they? Learn something from them? And to see if there is a level of engagement with the community that is greater than it is now. Because you know, I went to one of the board meetings, and the only people in the audience were the people who are running against the current board. I don’t think people understand exactly what a township is and what a township does. That’s another thing that we need to educate our residents about.
So what would be a successful term for me is if the community becomes as engaged as I am now, because I wasn’t before.
What are your thoughts on the proposed 0.75% tax increase?
I’m all for it. There’s so much disinformation about it. It’s such such a little amount of money, and I mean I’m not wealthy by any means, but it goes for public safety, and you know the same people who are crying that they don’t want it would be the first people who would be upset if the police did not show up in a reasonable amount of time when they needed them. And it’s just a fact of life, we have to pay for the things that we get, they’re not free.
So people are exaggerating it, for one thing. It’s 75 cents on a hundred dollars. It’s not, you know, thousands of dollars every year, unless you spend a lot of money. But it’s not on cars, it’s not on groceries, it’s not on prescriptions. So it really shouldn’t change your lifestyle.
And we haven’t had a [property] tax increase in Kane County in over 10 years.
Lauzen, he was the former county board chair, he did not want to raise taxes for anybody, and in order to make the budget he just cut 10% of every department’s budget. He was very indiscriminate about what he did. He just did it. Didn’t matter, 10% comes off. So some of the things that we lost ended up costing us more money.
For example, they cut the ankle monitor program so that people didn’t have to be incarcerated, they could wear an ankle monitor. Well, that went away so there were more people in the jail, which cost the county more money. It also cost those people more money because they couldn’t work, because they were in jail.
Also, the employees who work for our county are paid so much less than anybody in the surrounding counties that we lose really good people to DuPage County, to Kendall County, to McHenry. If they can do the same work there and make more money, why wouldn’t they go? I would go. And we want to keep those good people – especially in public safety. We want to keep those court clerks. We want to keep those people who are necessary to run our safety infrastructure.
So it’s not going to buy new park benches. It’s going to public safety, which is one of the most important things, I think any of us would say, the county would provide.
Why should people vote for you?
Vote for me if you want somebody who regards transparency and taking care of all the people, and not just some of the people, highly. I think between all of us who are running together, we’ve got a beautiful cross section of people. We have people who are experienced. So vote for me, because I think I will do the best job, if that’s what you’re looking for.
