Rear: City Clerk Phyllis Clark, Ward 1 City Council member Maryalice Wu, Ward 6 City Council member William Colbrook
This afternoon, Urbana convened an electoral board meeting for the first time in twenty years. Two recent candidate petitions for Urbana offices in the 2021 election have been challenged, and Illinois statute spells out the process that must be followed by municipal bodies to perform the necessary hearing.
Unfortunately, that process did not go smoothly. Today’s event was a “meeting”, and not a “hearing”, because the hearing was never actually convened. First, concerns about the agenda and public input rules were raised during public input.
Twelve minutes into the meeting, the hearing officer that Urbana hired to help with the process, Deanna Mool, interrupted public input and requested that the board go back and vote to amend the agenda. Apparently, the City Clerk posted a meeting agenda on Friday, then swapped it with an amended agenda on Saturday. Then, shortly before the meeting, a revised amended agenda was emailed to the board members but no notice was given to the public and no one updated the City calendar. The public had no access to view the revised amended meeting agenda.
After passing a revised amended agenda that the public still could not see, the electoral board restarted the meeting, including public input. Then concerns about the composure of the electoral board were raised during public input, and again, public input was interrupted by Maryalice Wu so that Mool could arbitrate.
Thirty minutes into the meeting, Mool explained that she just checked with the City Attorney, James Simon, and learned that the electoral board was not yet legally seated because they had not acquired a signed order from a judge. Simon then did the only thing he knows how to do, and pontificated for nine minutes straight to essentially say, “we screwed up, and we need to start over”.
Another ten minutes was spent fumbling with scheduling concerns and the fifty minute meeting was adjourned without having engaged in any of the procedural steps of an electoral hearing. All the while, the two candidates who had poured all of their free time over the previous three days into gathering the knowledge and evidence needed to defend their right to appear on the ballot sat in the back of the Council Chambers, never having uttered a single word. They weren’t even consulted when the board tried to arrange times to reconvene the meeting on Tuesday.
The electoral board agreed to reconvene at 9am on Tuesday to reorient itself and make sure that the board is legally constituted. This should be possible now, since Chief Judge Karle Koritz has signed an order authorizing the board membership. The board will likely convene again at 5:30pm on Tuesday, and may even begin the hearing proceedings.
The full December 7th, 2020 Urbana Electoral Board Hearing video can be viewed here:
Articles and documents about the two candidate objections can be viewed here:
Township Assessor Seeks to Disqualify Urbana City Council Candidate on Minor Technicalities
Diane Marlin Donor Verifies Candidate Challenge in Wrong County
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana