McHenry County coroner will send death information directly to county clerk to help in cleaning voter rolls

McHenry County Coroner Michael Rein has spent his first month in his new role looking for ways to strengthen communication and build relationships with other offices, which led to the decision to provide the County Clerk’s Office with direct access to death information to aid them in cleaning the county’s voter rolls.

Rein has focused on the small ways that he can improve collaboration and efficiency, without increasing the department’s spending, he said in an interview Tuesday.

McHenry County Clerk Joe Tirio said Tuesday that having open communication and collaboration between the county’s various governmental offices is “categorically” good for taxpayers.

“We should all be looking for ways that we can share the data that we have access to that will improve operations across the county,” Tirio said. “That is phenomenal.”

The systems around removing deceased persons from the county’s voter rolls are already very strong, Tirio said. Deaths are reported to the state and the state informs the clerk’s office of any deceased persons that need to be expunged from the county’s voter registration system.

“It’s just an issue of timing,” Tirio said of this new, more direct communication between the two offices. “He’ll know before virtually anybody else would know and so we’ll get that much of a head start.”

While this new communication channel will not make a large impact, it will be helpful to the daily workflow of the clerk’s office and could potentially give them “additional data points” about a deceased person that the state may not provide, helping to clear up situations of duplicate names more quickly, Tirio said.

Rein said he is also working to communicate more efficiently with the Veterans Assistance Commission of McHenry County, reporting the deaths of veterans directly to the agency so that it can offer services to the families of those veterans.

The Veterans Assistance Commission of McHenry County provides a number of services to eligible veterans and their surviving family members, including financial assistance, according to their page on the county’s website.

Rein has also spoken about the potential for his office to provide more information to the McHenry County Assessments Office to aid their work in assessing the value of properties in the county for the calculation of property taxes, Tirio said.

Sharing death information with the County Assessments Office would allow them to readjust taxpayer benefits associated with a property, when appropriate, in a more timely manner, Tirio explained. An example of this would be removing the senior services benefit for reduced tax payments on a property once that senior has passed away, he said.

In his first three weeks in office, Rein also decided to consolidate two part-time deputy secretary positions into one full-time deputy coroner position, for which they are now hiring.

This move, Rein said, will increase efficiency and improve office staff’s ability to keep up with the demand for a deputy coroner or chief deputy coroner to be available outside of normal working hours.

Since this does not change the department’s budget nor the fundamental structure of the impacted positions, it does not need to go to the McHenry County Board for approval, he said.