“No person shall be elected to the office of President for more than two full four-year terms.” Village Ordinance Code 2-1.1
“No person shall be elected to the office of Trustee for more than two full four-year terms.” Village Ordinance Code 2-2.1
Wilmette’s village code makes it very clear; in this village, elected officials can get elected to two four-year terms as a village trustee, and two four-year terms as village president – no more.
For the most part, its current board members are happy that’s the case.
“I heard about term limits long before I was a trustee,” board member Julie Wolf said. “Now that I’ve been on the board, it makes even more sense.”
Whether, like Wolf, they are running for a second term in the April 2015 municipal election, are coming to the end of their eight year total, or have another two years before they decide to run again, trustees polled over the past month unanimously supported legislated limits to village runs.
Some support the current caps. Others thought the decades-old system could theoretically be tweaked, but weren’t willing to abandon it.
Current and past elected officials, including three former board presidents, say term limits – an apparent municipal rarity in Illinois, judging by responses from local academics and state or regional municipal lobbying groups – work in this town of roughly 27,300 because Wilmette voters pay attention to municipal affairs, and provide a constantly refreshed pool of well-qualified people willing to run for office.
“We benefit tremendously from having a relatively affluent, relatively educated and involved community,” second-term Trustee Cameron Krueger said.
Trustee Alan Swanson, who leaves the board next spring, agreed, saying, “We have circumstances that might not be in place in different communities.”
Current board president Bob Bielinski and other elected officials brushed aside arguments against term limits; that they put power in the hands of unelected administrators, that they limit institutional memory at the board level, or that they infringe on voters’ ballot box rights.
“While there’s certainly the risk of an entrenched administration in any community, that’s not the case in Wilmette,” Bielinski said. “The board is certainly not afraid to set the agenda, nor is it afraid to disagree with the staff.”
Trustees can easily access the experience of previous board members, and Trustee Carol Ducommun has done just that. Those who want to serve their community longer than eight years can choose other ways to do so, Bielinski said, including the village’s many appointed boards.
“I absolutely accept that there are some benefits to having no term limits, or longer term limits,” outgoing two-term Trustee Mike Basil said. “The question is: Are the benefits outweighed by the danger of power staying in the hands of the same people? And I think they are.”
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Most village trustees also said that local boards without term limits, such Wilmette’s park and library district boards, should enact limits, if only to change their make-up more regularly.
“Frankly, I think it’s a good lesson for other units of government,” Basil said.
Mistrust of entrenched power was behind the push for term limits, and was interwoven with the collapse of the village’s former caucus system, according to former board president Nancy Canafax, who served in that role from 1997 to 2005.
Canafax said the caucus system fell apart after a vitriolic 1969 election in which one of the central battles between the traditional caucus party and a new splinter party was over potential affordable housing coming to the village. Wilmette actually went to the polls twice that year, after a federal court invalidated the first election.
One of the winning trustees, Thelma Brook Simon, who came to the board unopposed in 1961 through the caucus system, watched the turmoil and decided term limits were needed, Canafax said. Simon subsequently chaired the board judiciary committee that recommended term limits, which became part of village law in the 1970s.
In a 2011 essay about Simon for the League of Women Voters, Canafax wrote: “Thelma thought many of the people in office with her preferred a ‘closed government’, which she referred to as a ‘dynasty’ … The Judiciary Committee, under her leadership argued for the limitation saying that, after eight years, the elected become jaded or think the job belongs to them.”
Former board president Vernon Squires also traced the push for term limits back to the 1969 election.
Squires, who led the village from 1981 to 1989, supports limits, adding “You can look at up to eight years in one position and in my mind that’s plenty of time – it tends to wear you down.”
Squires thinks shorter terms, such as the unofficial limit of two two-year terms in his current residence of Winnetka, isn’t practical: “To my mind it takes a while to learn the ropes.”
While Krueger disagreed, saying, “I learned what I needed to know in the first 12 to 18 months,” he suggested he might not object to changing limits from absolute to consecutive (in which an elected official could try for a third term after leaving the board for a set amount of time.) Trustee Ted McKenna was also open to the idea.
Chris Canning, who served two terms as board president from 2005 to 2013, said he thought the only “appropriate” way to change the limits would be by referendum.
Other board members appeared equally open on a theoretical level to term adjustments, but no one thought there was any impetus for change.
“I think we got it right,” current Trustee Basil summed up.