Here’s a story that stinks: Cook County’s sewage management and flood prevention agency, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD), costs taxpayers more than a billion dollars a year.
Where’s all that money going? Turns out, about 60% of all contracts approved by the Board of Commissioners of the MWRD went to their own campaign donors.
You read that right: a handful of private companies give major campaign donations to keep the incumbent Commissioners (all Democrats) elected, and in return, the Board approves hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts for those same companies.
Is there any return on that taxpayer investment? Not much—the Chicago Tribune found that, on average, the MWRD was discharging raw sewage into the waterways every six days. In 2017, there were nearly 2000 separate raw sewage dumps throughout Cook County. For a billion bucks a year, that’s pretty poor performance.
It stinks—but voters can take action on March 20th!
All of the current Commissioners of the MWRD are Democrats. Five of the nine Commissioner seats—a controlling majority—will be on the ballot in 2018, but the Republican Party doesn’t have a full slate of candidates, and the deadline to file more has passed.
The Illinois Green Party is the only opposition party that’s standing up to say “no” to corruption and waste in Cook County. With a full slate of candidates, the Green Party is positioned to take majority control away from Cook County Democrats, and give it back to the taxpayers.
We can stop the corruption—but we need your votes on March 20th to do it! Visit our “How to Vote” page to find your polling place, and learn about the special write-in-only primary announced in January.
It will take 1,720 Cook County voters pulling a Green Party ballot and casting a write-in vote for candidate Geoffrey Cubbage in the “Vacancy of Bradford” election (a special election the Democrat-controlled Cook County Clerk’s office announced less than a month before the start of voting) to qualify all five candidates for the November election.
Without those votes, the Democrat Party is guaranteed another six years of majority control on the elected Board of Commissioners that’s spending your dollars to reward their donors.
Do the right thing for Cook County: vote Green in the March 20th primary!