Re-learning hard lesson that creation is almost always messy

Creation is a messy business. Just ask the guy who strikes out on his own after dying a little each day in cubicle world. Or a mother delivering a baby. Or those who hope to lead a community formed mostly out of resentment.

Those who created and hope to lead Campton Hills deserve a lot of credit, though. Incredibly naïve about public nature and public governance, they eventually educated themselves enough to get an incorporation question on the ballot and delivered enough threats about "big bad Elgin" to get a new community created earlier this year.

That's when they discovered that living with those who disagree with them isn't nearly as easy as dissing the evil empire. And that the real threat to peace and tranquility wasn't outsiders, but the recalcitrant living within their own borders. Those clashes were apparent throughout the incorporation effort and have only grown more virulent.

"We're going to do it different," said one of the hopeful insiders appointed to the new board temporarily.

"I think the acrimony is going to be almost impossible to overcome until the dust does settle," said another resident with a decidedly different view.

The winners got off to a less than magnanimous start, basically setting up a closed shop to pick the first board members. "Who are these people there with their noses up in the air who will not let us in?" asked one woman who was initially banned from a board selection meeting.

One of the new community's first big acts was -- you guessed it -- the very evil perpetrated on them by Elgin -- an annexation. Incorporation opponents have not gone gently into that good night, either. They've gone to court, subdivision by subdivision, in attempts to convince a judge to let them out of the new village. They created a group and rounded up signatures in an attempt to put a dissolution question on the ballot. A slate of anti-village candidates is on the ballot for election in February.

The new board seemed a bit stunned initially by the animosity, but got into the flow of the game. Though it touted the new community's right to independence from the taint of Elgin, Kane County and awful developers, it fought in court every effort by subdivisions to exercise their own. It moved to take over the Wasco Sanitary District until a lawsuit stopped that effort. But it was learning, too. It filed three silly advisory referendum questions, not because it couldn't figure out what to do with mosquitoes, early warning sirens or impact fees, but because those three questions would prevent the dissolution question from making the February ballot.

And it worked. A judge rejected a request to place the dissolution question on the ballot as a fourth question, saying out loud what incorporation opponents needed to hear as well.

"I think the problem your clients have is they weren't paying attention," Judge Michael Colwell told the attorney for the Stop Campton Hills Public Action Committee, which was proposing dissolution. "To the victor goes the spoils."

There were battles over election petitions, blatant violations of the Illinois Open Meetings Act and plenty of nasty letters to the editor. And so many costly court skirmishes that the village decided recently it couldn't afford to hire an administrator, land planner, engineer and filing clerk. And that was just the first eight months.

One can only hope that as is the case in creating a new business or a new little human, the pain of creation eventually will be replaced by its wonder. Eventually.