Finally some sanity in Bensenville as Village Attorney Frank Soto plans to take on John "don't meigs with us" Geils for the village Presidency.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-bensenville-president-w-zonemar27,0,2471278.story
By James Kimberly | Tribune reporter March 27, 2009
The specter of an expanding O'Hare International Airport is ever-present in Bensenville, as are the low-flying jets that take off and land from some of the busiest runways in the nation.
At the city limits, attached to the "Welcome to Bensenville" signs are big photographs of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the phrase, "Don't Meigs With Us," a reference to the downtown Chicago island airport Daley surreptitiously closed in 2003.
In the lobby of Village Hall, a videotape of Bensenville leaders at a news conference blasting the O'Hare Modernization Program plays on a loop.
Even the re-election signs for President John Geils, who is seeking a seventh term in the April 7 election, have a picture of an airplane with a circle and slash over it.
Soto, 43, believes Geils has been too singularly focused on O'Hare to the detriment of other issues in town. He said he has been knocking on doors and listening to people and that the O'Hare project is not very high on people's list of concerns.
"It isn't the first," Soto insists. "It's about the third."
Bensenville residents are more concerned about the same things that people far from the airport are concerned about—property taxes, water rates and the quality of roads and schools, he said.
Soto, an attorney who specializes in worker's compensation cases and civil litigation, grew up in Wood Dale and has lived in Bensenville nearly all his adult life. He is seeking office, he said, because he is concerned about the direction the village is headed.
Fighting the expansion of O'Hare is a losing battle, he said. The village would be better served to accept the inevitable and sit at the table with Chicago officials to negotiate terms beneficial to the community.
Bensenville should be talking about flight patterns and replacement tax dollars and maybe some state or federal money to help the local district build new schools, he said.
"The concept that we don't want to control our own destiny is going to hurt us the next four or five years, because that's when these critical decisions are going to be made," Soto said.
Geils, a fourth-generation Bensenville resident, and his family run a funeral home on York Road. Even so, he had to prove he lives in his home at 208 York Rd. in Bensenville to fend off an objection to his candidacy. During the hearings, Geils acknowledged that he spends as many as four days a week at a family resort in Green Lake, WI
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