Passage of a Home Rule Referendum Will Severely Limit County Board Members’ Power

It’s hard to believe that a majority of McHenry County Board members would volunteer to give up power.

If they vote to put a Home Rule referendum on the ballot and if it passes, Board members will lose the power to craft the budget and resolutions and ordinances the Board pass could be vetoed by the County Executive, the creation of which is required of Home Rule counties.

I asked a County Board member, “Wondering if in your research on Home Rule, if you have figured out how much power Board members will lose if the referendum passes.”

Below is the well-reasoned answer:

The short answer is: yes, individual board members lose significant power under Home Rule, and most of it flows to one person.

Here’s what changes.

Right now, the McHenry County Board operates as the dominant governing body.

The board controls the budget process, hires and fires the County Administrator, and governs by simple majority, ten of eighteen members.

Every board member’s vote carries real weight.

Home Rule requires creating an elected County Executive.

That’s not optional, it’s baked into the Illinois Constitution.

You cannot have one without the other.

And that County Executive comes with powers that fundamentally shift the balance:

The executive proposes the annual budget.

The board no longer leads that process, it reacts to what the executive puts on the table.

That’s a significant loss of leverage for every board member, regardless of party.

The executive hires and fires department heads.

Today the board, through the County Administrator it controls, maintains direct oversight of county operations.

Under Home Rule, that chain of accountability runs through one elected official the board cannot remove.

The executive can veto any ordinance or resolution the board passes.

To override that veto, the board needs eleven of eighteen members, a three-fifths supermajority.

Under the current structure, ten votes governs.

Under Home Rule, a board member on the majority side of a 10-8 vote suddenly finds their vote meaningless if the executive vetoes it.

You now need eleven, not ten.

That veto threshold is the most underappreciated part of this entire discussion.

It means a single elected executive can routinely frustrate the will of a board majority.

Every board member, Republican or Democrat, becomes less powerful the moment a County Executive takes office.

There’s one more thing worth noting.

McHenry County voters made a meaningful reform in 2016 when they began directly electing their Board Chairman.

That was a genuine step toward democratic accountability.

Home Rule doesn’t build on that reform, it replaces the elected Chairman with a County Executive whose powers make the current Chairman look like a department head by comparison.

I’ve done a great deal of research on this.

I opposed the binding referendum and I’m skeptical of the non-binding one for reasons I’ve written about elsewhere.

But on your specific question yes, every board member who votes for Home Rule is voting to make themselves measurably less powerful.

Whether their constituents know that is another question entirely.