Colette Lueck and Ray Johnson are two members of the LGBT community who happen to serve as trustees on the Oak Park Village Board.
Windy City Times recently interviewed them to find out what issues they face—and the wide-ranging effects of the state's fiscal trouble was at the top of the list. Lueck and Johnson also discussed public safety issues, the potential for regional LGBT alliances and the importance of electing women to public office.
Windy City Times: Collette, what do you do?
Colette Lueck: I am the managing director of the Illinois Children's Mental Health Partnership. I do a lot of advocacy work in my job around children's mental health issues. It's an amazing opportunity—and a very rare opportunity—to make mental health what mental health should be. To do all of the things that make more sense: like prevention, like early childhood services, as opposed to waiting until kids are involved with juvenile justice. Many of the kids who end up in the juvenile justice system end up there because they have undiagnosed mental health needs. So it's been a great job. It still, I think, will be a great job, but we are on the chopping block along with everybody else.
WCT: Did you get any sense of resolution from the budget that was just passed?
CL: No. I've heard two different things: I've heard the 13 percent really is a 50-percent cut. And then the governor has a billion dollars he can cut from anywhere, and you have no idea where those cuts are going to land. And then there's the state employee cuts. So if you add in the employee cuts, it's getting you up closer to what the original doomsday budget looked like.
Ray Johnson: And as elected officials on the local level, we see firsthand when the state abrogates [ its ] responsibility, and what happens on the front line.
WCT: How does that trickle down?
RJ: In Oak Park, where you do have strong schools, those schools are supported by the property tax. Eighty percent of our tax bill goes to the schools, so people are feeling the pressure from both ends—economically, their wages have not gone up or, worse, they've lost their job. And their tax bill is rising because education costs keep going up, as well as a lot of other costs. When energy cost goes up thirty percent, or last year asphalt went up 40 percent, that means we're going to repave fewer streets because we can't raise property taxes. So we're faced with this choice: Do we do less streets, or do we lay off a cop? And we're not going to lay off a cop. So that means that our infrastructure's going to suffer.
CL: We don't have a concerted public health approach to violence in Chicago. So you have no trauma services for kids who go to schools where somebody has been shot, or who've witnessed a shooting. All those kids go untreated, so then you start getting this cycle of more and more violent behavior. You can't predict who the next person will be who will commit a violent crime—that's virtually impossible to do—but you can do a broad-based public health approach that equips communities and their residents to deal with violence and therefore mitigate its impact, and that actually in the end ends up mitigating the opportunities for violence to occur.
RJ: I think that LGBT elected officials across the Chicago metro region should get together, and talk about these issues, and lead on these issues. Because I think in many regards we have some of the skills, or the experiences that can help shape the way we talk about these problems, and then help find solutions as well. I always feel like on both sides—east of Halsted and west of Halsted—things happen and it's like, once you leave the city, we're forgotten. I'd love to see some of that, and hopefully we can take that idea forward.
WCT: Are you talking about using a public-health model to approach different social issues?
RJ: Exactly. How do we collectively prioritize our issues? Civil unions is one part of our broader range of issues and for a good number of Oak Parkers, civil unions [ aren't ] even on their radar. They can't just hear about LGBT elected officials when there's an LGBT issue. It's got to be about this more collective range of issues that deal with economic development and public safety and social service networks and things like that.
CL: I think it's important to have women elected officials. Listening to the hearings on Sotomayor—she really had to discount her individuality. Like somehow there's a disconnect between who you are as a person, and being rational and following the law. There is no disconnect. Both are equally important, and she had to totally back off from that. I think it's important to have women elected officials at every level of government. I think there is a different style. And the challenge is that when you join a board, or a legislative body, you enter a male-dominated environment. And so you have challenges in terms of how are you going to interact within that dominant structure.
See www.oak-park.us/Government/government.html .
