The DeKalb County Board approved seven out of eight items on the 2003 Legislative Agenda in the monthly meeting at Sycamore’s Gathertorium.

The Legislative Agenda proposes topics of concern for the upcoming year. Items approved for the agenda will then be pursued through the proper legal process of legislative vote or public referendum.

Initially, the items were to be voted on in a package and approved through one vote.

However, county board member Joseph M. Wiegand distributed a paper titled “DeKalb County 2003 Legislative Agenda – A Recipe for Massive Tax Increases,” that caused enough of a stir to necessitate individual votes on each item. The work of Wiegand suggested that the items were all flawed and illustrated the lack of preparedness of the council toward the agenda.

In his work, Wiegand argued against an item on the agenda that would seek sponsorship for a court interpreter for a diverse county population saying that “financially penalizing citizens who have taken sufficient time and effort to master the English language to subsidize services for those who have not weakens the incentive to learn English – the mother language of our common culture.”

In the individual votes that followed Wiegand’s explanation for his work that he distributed before the meeting, he proceeded to vote against every item on the agenda.

All but one of the items passed. Only a few of the items received more than a couple opposing votes besides Wiegand’s.

The one item that was left on the Legislative Agenda for 2003 was one that would have raised county gasoline taxes to support county road construction and maintenance.

“We have not gone down to the household level, the cost per household is too great,” Wiegand said.

The item was defeated narrowly, with 10 votes in favor of it and 13 votes opposing it.

Even if approved, the motion would have had to have been approved through a referendum by the voting public of DeKalb County.

A farmland preservation measure was approved as one of the items for the legislative agenda.

That measure’s aim will be to ask legislators to sponsor a bill to grant counties purchase of development rights in an attempt to save farmland in the county from other development. Star Poll