McHenry County Blog

The tax hikers of Carpentersville District 300 are up and about on the internet again this year.

But, just like Professor Milton Rakow's 1979 book title, "

"We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent"

If you are not on their side of the tax hiking agenda, they take your name of their email list.

No matter.

A friend of McHenry County Blog got and forwarded it anyway.

The most recent Advance 300 electronic missive is below. (It looks like the writer took Latin. Note the plural of "referendum" is not the Americanized "referendums," but "referenda." And, as usual, I have added some paragraphs to make it easier to read.)

Hello District 300 Voters!

Here it is a year after the referenda passed and we are gearing up for another election. Only this time Advance 300 is not campaigning! As you may already know, there are eight candidates running for the District 300 Board of Education (BOE). The election is on April 17th. (Mark your calendars!)

Click here for voter information.

Note that Advance 300 is not endorsing any particular candidate(s). Instead we are gathering information on all of the candidates to pass on to you, the voters. We are confident that, armed with all available relevant information, you are very capable of choosing on your own.

As our first installment...

Click here to review the candidates' responses to our Advance300 Candidate Questionnaire!

While we patterned our questionnaire after the local newspapers' questionnaires, ours is much more extensive. As you can read from the link above, we took great pains to give every candidate an equal opportunity to respond to important questions.

However, do not conclude that we will be presenting all the information we gather in such an unbiased manner - to the contrary.
While there are several very good candidates, there are also those candidates who we think do not appear to be qualified to serve on the Board at this time or whose interests seem to lay in places other than with the quality of our kids' education and the health of our community.

We will not personally attack any candidate. We will not present rumor or innuendo.

We will not present any information that we cannot back up.

But we will present any relevant, verifiable information, positive, negative or neutral, that we can uncover.

As an example, five of the eight candidates responded to our questions. One told us what we could do(!) with our questionnaire. One told us that they had been on vacation (but still chose not to respond after we offered additional time). And a third did not respond to the questionnaire at all. We think that this is useful information in making your voting decision.

Our next steps?

In the days to come, we plan to prepare additional web pages for individual candidates with information that we gather. Again, we will not personally attack any given candidate but we will pull no punches with the information that we gather and present to you. If, in our opinion, it is legitimate information and affects a candidate's ability to effectively represent the community on the Board, we will tell you about it.

Finally, if there is a question that you would like us to ask or if you have relevant, verifiable information on any of the candidates, please email us at: advance300yes@yahoo.com. We will try to find out what you need to know or publish your information for others to see.

If you know of anyone else who may be interested in this type of information, please forward our email to them, asking them to contact us if they are interested in being added to our email blast list.

Check out what else is new:

Read the D300 press release and Moody's summary report on the recent increase in D300's Moody's bond rating to "A3" and how it could mean hundreds of thousands of interest savings to the district!

Read how the State has delayed $30 million in grant money to help build D300 schools. Learn how you can help.

Read here to clear up recent misconceptions about the growth and enrollment projections that were used during the spring 2006 referendum campaign.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,
Advance 300
www.advance300yes.org
Email at advance300yes@yahoo.com

We do not intend to send these emails to anybody who prefers not to receive them. We will immediately stop sending you any more if you reply to this email and just let us know. Or you can click on the List Serve Link at the bottom of this email to get removed from our list. If you had already asked to be removed and are still receiving this email, our apologies. You can be sure that it was an oversight in the management of our list since the end of the referendum and we will rectify that if you let us know. If however, you had previously asked to be removed and want to be back on the list, you need to let us know that too.

I found disingenuous the statement

"Advance 300 is not endorsing any particular candidate(s)"

when the tax hiking group is announcing that it will put up web sites for "we plan to prepare additional web pages for individual candidates with information that we gather."

That sounds like an in-kind contribution to me.

Why not just be honest and remind folks that your are a very wealthy political action committee and want to elect candidates you agree with?

= = = = =
Tomorrow - My take on the tax hikers' explanation of enrollment.

Labels: Advance 300, District 300, School Board