All 3 DeKalb City Clerk candidates say they’ll serve full term if elected

DeKALB – When asked in a Daily Chronicle candidates forum if they would commit to serve out their full four-year term in office if elected, all three DeKalb City Clerk hopefuls said yes.

Shaw Local News Network posed the question to the candidates because the office has been plagued by turnover for more than a decade. Write-in candidates Bradley Hoey, Lynn Fazekas and Steve Kapitan all said they hope to bring needed stability to the clerk’s role. The City Clerk’s role is primarily administrative, in charge of administering local elections, keeping minutes at public meetings and certifying documents.

[ 2 former clerks, 1 newcomer seek election to DeKalb’s long-suffering City Clerk’s Office ]

The consolidated election is April 1, and early voting is already underway.

Candidates were asked what ideas they have to combat historic turnover in the office.

Candidates’ responses, listed in alphabetical order, have been edited down for length. To see their full responses from the recent forum, watch the video or listen to the podcast at shawlocal.com/daily-chronicle/election.

Fazekas

Fazekas was appointed to the Clerk’s role by former Mayor Jerry Smith in 2018. She served out the remainder of the unexpired term left by her predecessor Susanna Herrmann who left after a year.

Response to turnover question:

“I think first we have to redefine the problem. I think there’s been a lot of groupthink that has gone on because in what business could you break up a job, reduce or eliminate the pay, allow rudeness and other unprofessional conduct toward the employee and blame the employee for an extreme turnover issue. No, that’s not correct. What we need to do is face the reality that the city has a lot of responsibility here, not just the clerk. This means the clerk must remind them of that and point it out, even if it’s unpopular. And, of course, the elected clerk doesn’t get fired for being unpopular with the city. Getting it on the agenda and to start talking about negotiations. What I’m looking at is the clerk being a transitional role at this point. It’s going to be staking out the territory on what’s non-negotiable to me – covering the elections and also meeting attendance. Those are extremely important."

Hoey

Retired Northern Illinois University communications staffer. He currently serves as special projects manager for DeKalb County Convention and Visitors Bureau. A native of Rockton, Hoey has resided in DeKalb for more than 30 years.

Response to turnover question:

“There has to be some willingness and some collaboration with the elected officials, the leadership at city council, that is the mayor, on restoring or collaborating on making sure that those duties of city clerk exist and will be fulfilled. I think that I bring a spirit of collaboration, a spirit of getting things done and I think I’d bring some leadership and some ideas that will, I think, help the city clerk evolve and get back to a position where it once was. Again, I think you have to work with the leadership in that capacity. You also have to be able to work with the staff in that capacity because right now, the staff has all those duties. Whoever of the three of us gets elected, we’re going to have to go and assume a number of those duties. So, I know I have the skillset. I know I have the experience. And I know I have the ability to work with leadership. I do have experience in working with government. I have great experience of working with this administration.”

Kapitan

A DeKalb resident since 1980, he graduated from NIU with a Bachelors degree in economics. He was a DeKalb City Council alderman from 1995 to 2007 and City Clerk from 2009 to 2012, resigning before his term was up. He works as a file maintenance clerk at Jewel-Osco in Sycamore.

Response to turnover question:

“One thing would be to better implement the historical record in the municipal code. What I mean by that is, when you look at municipal code, in each section, there will be what I call, ‘a little bug’ in parentheses at the end of the title or at the end of a subsection. In it, it identifies the year and the ordinance number within that year that made changes to the municipal code. If someone is curious about ‘well, why did the city change the code to make it say what it says today?’ They could go into the municipal code and at the end section that they’re concerned about, they would see the little bug that tells them when the resolution was passed that made those changes. So, they can just directly go and look up that resolution. [...] And that’s just an example of that kind of thing representing the interest of the public and not the interest of an administrative bureaucracy.”