Boone County Watchdog

Citybarbs is fixing to say goodbye to the Wogen Watch blog and wouldn’t you know it, here’s another to take its place on the blogroll. Check out the Boone County Watchdog run by Bill Pysson, who also has an interesting story to tell as a former District 100 School Board candidate. Pysson is prolific, mixing…

Transparency Checklist

It is hardly a piece of cake to be a member of the Sunlight Foundation‘s organization for state and local bloggers known as the Citizens for Open Government (COG) group. I kid you not. The number of e-mail messages can get crazy some days. Most of the group are “transparency professionals,” such as newspaper reporters…

Two Mayors in the Paper Today

The mayors of DeKalb and Cortland each stood his ground on matters of conscience today in the Northern Star. –In a letter to the editor, Mayor Povlsen defends his decision to keep applicants to the 3rd and 7th ward alderman positions secret, equating and applying a “code of ethics” he followed as a counselor at…

A Second Reason to Leave the $45 Million Bond Issue to the Voters

When the airline fuel “order acceptance centers” settled in Sycamore (about 2004 give or take) it effectively doubled the County’s sales tax revenues to $4 million. Now the county will have money coming in from the County Home TIF that the City of DeKalb recently discontinued, and I was just reading in the Chicago Trib…

City-County Budget Comparison: Information Technology & Services

County of DeKalb 9 groups of elected offices (County Board, County Clerk, etc.) 9 appointed boards & commissions 18 departments 552 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions (approx.) 2010 budget for Information Management: $1,004,400* (PDF p. 6) 2010 budgeted regular compensation for IM: $542,000 2010 budgeted overtime for IM: $14,000 Number of IM employees: 10 City of…

County Board Gagged Over Mega-Dump

Read the press release from Stop DeKalb County Mega-Dump group and see the e-mail that forbids County Board members from contacts with constituents about the landfill application at DeKalb County Online.