Corruption is in Cook County, Illinois, and it is endangering residents. This week, the Chicago Tribune reported on a scandal more than 20 years in the making.
Like every town across the nation, south suburban Crestwood tucks a notice into utility bills each summer reassuring residents their drinking water is safe. Village leaders also trumpet the claim in their monthly newsletter, while boasting they offer the cheapest water rates in Cook County.
But those pronouncements hide a troubling reality: For more than two decades, the 11,000 or so residents in this working-class community unknowingly drank tap water contaminated with toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems, a Tribune investigation found.
Crestwood is a small suburb south of Chicago. Unlike most of Cook County, it has a long history of Republican leadership, most notably under former mayor Chester Stranczek, who stepped down less than two years ago.
After 38 years as mayor and 50 years in public office, Crestwood Mayor Chester Stranczek said he plans to give up his post this fall.
Crestwood Mayor Chester Stranczek will be stepping down from his post this fall due to health issues even though he has two years left on his term. Who’s next in Crestwood?
The Republican leader’s legacy includes rebating a portion of his residents’ property taxes, outsourcing most village jobs and building a town where the number of businesses has gone from about 50 to nearly 600 during his tenure. In fact, Stranczek said, the village has little land left to develop.
Stranczek's son Robert is mayor now, and political power in Crestwood is a portrait in stability. Before Chester retired, he was described in the Daily Southtown as "America’s best small town mayor." In many ways, Crestwood is a Republican success story, a place where taxes are low despite being situated in one of the most urbanized counties in the United States. The village prides itself on having among the lowest municipal taxes in the country. In the shadow of Chicago, it is a tax haven that Grover Norquist could brag about.
How did Crestwood achieve this? Norquist would be proud of the ways in which the village ignored regulators and endangering the health of its citizens for years. The Illinois EPA informed the village in 1986 that its municipal well had been contaminated by dry cleaning solvents, including the highly toxic chemical vinyl chloride.
Crestwood, a village open for business, had developed a strip mall less than 300 feet from its well. One of the businesses in the strip mall was a dry cleaner.
Given this information from the EPA, local officials might have moved to close the well, or to clean it up.
That did not happen.
In response to the disclosure from the Illinois EPA, Crestwood
avoided scrutiny by telling state regulators in 1986 that they would get all of their tap water from Lake Michigan, and would use the well only in an emergency. But records show Crestwood kept drawing well water on a routine basis—relying on it for up to 20 percent of the village's water supply some months.
The well wasn't shut off for good until December 2007, after the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency tested the water for the first time in more than 20 years. The agency found not only that the well was still contaminated but that Crestwood had been piping the water, untreated, to residents.
This decision had consequences. Local residents have reported incidences of cancers, including brain tumors and kidney cancers. Now the Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is investigating why this well was used for more than 20 years after regulators brought its dangers to the attention of local officials.
Today, village leaders past and present are quiet as the investigation begins. It is possible that criminal charges will be brought; it is almost certain that afflicted residents will bring civil suits to court in the coming months.
What would have been the cost of remediating the well or bringing water in from another source? Would residents now, with all the information at their disposal, prefer to have had higher water rates over the past twenty years instead of unknown exposure to carcinogens?
Too often, anti-tax advocates fail to disclose the real costs of low tax rates. Perhaps the participants in Fox News Channel's tea parties could comment on the choice the village of Crestwood made opting to save money over human health.