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Candidates clash on transparency and county administration practices
Summary
At the League of Women Voters forum, candidates disagreed over whether recent office changes improved transparency. Incumbent Dan John Damel pointed to agenda item reports and published fund balances; Gordon Hintz and John Motts cited budget opacity and called for clearer reporting and program evaluation.
Transparency and administrative oversight were central themes at the Winnebago County Executive forum, where candidates offered contrasting assessments of improvements in county operations and proposed specific steps to increase public access to county work.
Incumbent Dan John Damel defended his administration’s transparency efforts, saying Winnebago County’s materials are easier to follow than in the past and promising more publicly posted fund balances. "Our meetings are recorded, our agendas are accurate, we have agenda item reports, we have draft resolutions," Damel said, adding that fund balances would be posted for every department so the public can "see where the spending is going month by month."
Gordon Hintz said information availability alone is not enough and criticized the current budget’s presentation. "The budget is not very transparent... Some of those things were hard to... take out of the budget," he said, arguing for clearer line items and program descriptions to help residents understand levy impacts.
Sheriff John Motts described his office’s transparency practices and urged that vendor studies paid for by the county be published in full. "That study should be available to the public in its entirety," Motts said, and he recommended combining program-based budgeting with line-item details so residents and supervisors can evaluate effectiveness.
All candidates supported more public outreach. Damel said agenda item reports give the public time to review materials before committee meetings; Hintz favored proactive promotion and meeting recaps to reach residents who no longer rely on daily local news; Motts proposed publishing use-of-force and internal-investigation summaries as part of annual reporting.
The candidates agreed that budget presentation and program evaluation are important tools for transparency but differed on how to achieve them and how much to expand the executive’s office staff to manage those functions.
The forum provided voters with specific steps the candidates said they would take to increase transparency, from web-posted department fund balances to publishing full vendor studies and combining budget approaches.
