Empire-building?

Thanks to Republican candidate for Sheriff Zane Seipler for bringing to light the plans of incumbent sheriff Keith Nygren to build a new County Public Safety Building. The Seipler-for-Sheriff campaign revealed this on its new information resource at www.mcsdexposed.com

Had anyone heard of this before Zane called attention to one of the visions of Nygren, disclosed on www.sheriffnygren.com? Probably somebody had, like at the County Board or the facilities or engineering division of the County or maybe even the Law & Justice Committee of the County Board?

But where was the information in the daily media in McHenry County for the common folks; you know, the taxpayers?

Take a look at the second "vision" of the current sheriff. The following is from his political campaign website at www.sheriffnygren.com (Can't find any mention of building plans on the official website of the McHenry County Sheriff's Department at www.mchenrysheriff.org)

"The second initiative we are currently working on and hope to complete during the next four years is the construction of a new public safety building for the Sheriff's Department. Due to the expansion of our court system in McHenry County, it will be necessary for the Sheriff's Offices to relocate nearby on the courthouse campus. A feasibility study to meet the needs of public safety has already been completed and preliminary architectural and engineering studies have determined square foot requirements and operational proximity needs. The McHenry County Board has determined this process to be a priority, and I believe we would have broken ground already had we not suffered the economic downturn we now find ourselves in."

Who says it is "necessary" to relocate nearby on the courthouse campus? Oh, you mean the government complex? Man alive, I hate that word "campus". A campus is where you go to college, not where you go to the hospital or go to pay your traffic ticket.

Didn't the sheriff (errr, I mean the taxpayers) just spend millions of dollars to add to the government center so we could have a hotel for detainees? What will happen to all those cells, if a new public safety building is built?

Is County government expanding too fast and unnecessarily? Rather than move the sheriff's office to a "new" building and have to build a new "secure" building with new cells, new locks, new electronics, new security, blah-blah-blah, why not move something else, like some of the courtrooms or the Public Defenders' Office or the State's Attorney's Office?

Maybe we need a few "rocket scientists" around here to figure out the answers. Or would just a new sheriff be the right answer?