May and April County Board Roundup

The most recent June update on the County Board is available here.

In April, the County Board:

• Seated a new County Board member Samantha Carter sworn in as recently appointed member Cameron Raab had to resign after moving to a new local home that is outside the District 6 boundaries. 
• Renamed the Shields Meeting Room (also known as Meeting Room 1 and the primary meeting area for the County Board) to the "Shields-Carter Meeting Room" to additionally honor Champaign County Board Member, Lloyd Carter Jr.
• There was also a lot of the ground work for May's redistricting map fight with two tracks of County Board members and the County Executive working group also working on maps and asking for public input.
• Board members explained threats and safety concerns on why some listed the County's administrative building as their address.
• The County Board sought input on reforms to the County's Animal Control department (WCIA. More from WICS here).
• The Municipal Consolidated Election results for many local governments were certified. Smile Politely's editorial board had analysis of the results here.

The April Committee of the Whole agenda packet is available here, minutes here, and the video is available here. 

The April regular County Board meeting links: agenda packet, minutes, and video. The County Clerk's presentation slides on election cost savings are available here. There was a brief discussion of why the County Board videos are no longer available at the IBM streaming link. From the minutes:

Board Chair Patterson asked why the meetings are no longer being streamed via IBM, leaving Facebook Live as the only available streaming of the meetings, and that not all past meetings are available on Facebook. County Executive Kloeppel stated IBM has ceased operations and the County is exploring other options; the unavailability of past meetings is due to technical issues with the recording.

May:

The big news from May was the Champaign County district map fight which ended with the Democratic majority choosing the map they preferred over the County Executive's veto (and support of her own redistricting group's recommendations). From the News-Gazette:

As expected, all 14 board Democrats at the Friday evening meeting again voted in favor of the reapportionment map they’d voted for May 20, easily overriding Kloeppel’s veto.

The new map, called the “equity” map, will affect the next decade’s worth of board elections by adjusting boundaries for the 11 districts.

The work of Democratic board Chairman Kyle Patterson, the equity map designates two districts, 6 and 11 in northern Champaign and Urbana, as majority-minority districts intended to maximize minority-voter impact.

More at the full article here. It details Republican complaints on the timing of the Special Meeting for the veto and some technical issues on census requirements that could cause legal problems depending on how closely the late Census data matches two different estimates used by the redistricting maps. Illinois Newsroom had more coverage on the redistricting issue and the veto override here.

There is additional coverage of May County Board meeting specifically over the redistricting map fight from the News-Gazette here and WCIA here.

Links for the Committee of the Whole meeting: agenda packet, minutes, and video.

Links for the regular County Board meeting: agenda packet and video.

There was also the first "Finance Committee Study Session" which had a great deal of community input on various uses for American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) relief funds coming to the County: agenda packet, minutes, and video. The minutes have run down of the public input at the meeting here on page two. The agenda packet also has public input in the form of numerous letters sent to the committee starting on page two of the packet.