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Illinois GOP Chairman and Cook County Commissioner Tim Schneider said his party plans to cultivate the support of nontraditional Republicans in 2015.
Schneider said the backing of persons who do not traditionally identify as Republican was crucial to the November victory of Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner, who will take office on Jan. 12. The state GOP chairman pointed specifically to Rauner’s strong campaign efforts on Chicago’s South Side and in other Democrat-leaning areas. Schneider added that continuing to secure the support of typically-Democratic voters and those who identify as independents will be crucial for strengthening the GOP’s influence in the state.
“We need to embrace … nontraditional Republicans, those who don’t traditionally vote Republican,” Scheider explained. He said the party needed to “go out and talk to those people and tell them what we stand for, and that’s lower taxes, less wasteful spending, a booming economy, a quality education for our kids, and jobs.”
Schneider was elected to his post with the Illinois Republican Party in May of 2014. The Bartlett resident also co-owns the Golf Club of Illinois in Algonquin and owns a self-serve carwash in Elgin.
As a member of the county board representing the 15th District in northwestern Cook County, Schneider said he believes county commissioners this year should prioritize pension reform, overhauling the county jail system and improving the delivery of quality care at the Cook County Health and Hospitals System.
The Daily Whale recently caught up with Schneider to discuss his work in politics and government. An edited version of that conversation follows.
DW: What’s on your agenda currently with the Illinois GOP?
TS: We’re spending a lot of time analyzing the information from the election – finding out what we did right and what we can improve on. [We’re] looking forward to a successful administration with the Rauner administration and looking forward to delivering on the promises that Republicans made in this election. We elected two new congressmen in Illinois, we elected Bruce Rauner governor and we’re looking forward to building a party and reaching out to minorities and reaching out to nontraditional Republicans as we move forward.
DW: What qualities do you believe Rauner possesses that will translate into strong leadership in the Governor’s Office?
TS: I met Bruce Rauner about a year-and-a-half ago, and he said that he was really upset that Illinois was 49th out of 50 in business climate in the nation. He said he wanted to improve the lives of all Illinoisans. Not just Republicans, but the nontraditional Republicans like African-Americans, Latinos, Greek Americans and Indian Americans. …
He did what the Republican Party needs to do, and that’s engage all these people. ... He was telling them, “Listen, we need to increase the minimum wage with workers’ comp reform and with tort reform – pro businesses initiatives. … I want to bring good jobs back to Illinois, and I want everybody to have a great life in Illinois.” Bruce stands for the things that I stand for and the Republican Party stands for and that’s lower taxes and less wasteful spending and building a great economy through business growth and jobs.
DW: What role do you believe bipartisanship will play in Illinois government in 2015?
TS: I know as a Republican elected official myself I don’t have all the right ideas. But I do know that if a Democrat comes up with a good idea, I’m going to buy into it. … If it helps the people of Cook County where I serve and it helps the people of Illinois for the governor, I’m sure he’s going to engage those people. It isn’t about Republicans fighting Democrats all of the time. It’s about compromising and listening to other people’s opinions and building a better state for the people of Illinois.
DW: As a first term county commissioner, you were a strong advocate for rolling back the sales tax. Tell me about that effort.
TS: I believe that Cook County government spent too much money. That 1 percent sales tax … create[d] an un-level playing field where people in Cook County were going outside of Cook County to buy their goods and services. … They might not go out and buy their groceries outside of Cook County, but they might go out and buy a high ticket item. … While they’re outside of Cook County they’ll go shop out there. So not only did we have people losing the sales tax for the major appliance, but we also lost the ancillary things that they might have bought while they were out of town. We see that all the time in Cook County with the gas tax. People travel outside of Cook County to buy their gas and while they’re out there they buy other things that we’re losing the sales tax on.
So what we needed to do with the 1 percent sales tax was to level the playing field – bring your sales tax down to a reasonable level. And secondarily, … that 1 percent sales tax allowed Todd Stroger’s administration to spend $400 million more. So what we did is not only level the playing field – lower the tax on the people of Cook County – but Cook County government had to operate leaner and meaner. … Another big reason why I opposed the sales tax was we needed to shrink county government, not expand county government, and that forced us to live with less.
DW: Can you tell me about working with Toni Preckwinkle as a member of the Cook County Board?
TS: President Preckwinkle and I, for the most part, get along very well. I think she has brought a strong amount of fiscal responsibility to the county. I think we have a long way to go, but she’s brought a tremendous amount more transparency and accountability to the county. Having served under the Stroger administration for four years, frankly, we couldn’t go anywhere but up. Many of the performance metrics that the president has put in place, I applaud it.
We have our differences on many items, but what we agree upon is that we need to provide alternatives to incarceration in our jail. It’s $143 a day to keep someone in the Cook County Jail. We spend almost double that to keep nearly 400 children in our juvenile temporary detention center. We need to find alternatives and resources to provide these kids with alternatives to get them on the right track. Whether it’s a proper living environment or whether its mental health treatment or counseling, we need to provide those nonviolent children and nonviolent criminals alternatives to incarceration. Not only is it a very costly thing, it’s also a moral thing to do.
DW: What other measures do you believe the county board must address this year?
TS: We have to look at our pension issues and come up with a pension solution that we can send to Springfield that will survive scrutiny from the courts. …
The most important thing that we’re going to do is we have to ensure that the county health system – we have a program at the county health system called County Care, … it’s plus or minus a 100,000 people in County Care in Cook County – and we need to ensure that they are delivered really good quality service and quality patient care so that we can keep those people in County Care. …
Right now, because of the Affordable Care Act, we receive money for all these people that we traditionally never got money for and it’s to the tune of about $600 a month for each individual in County Care. We’ll we need to keep those people in County Care so we can afford to provide services to the indigent that don’t qualify for County Care. And we also need to make sure that the majority of those people in County Care are using our core county services, which I mean are Stroger Hospital, our group of clinics, Provident Hospital and Oak Forest Hospital. If they use the other 138 partners that we are partnered with, … we pay the fee for service at those hospitals. … If all of our patients decide that they don’t want to go to Stroger or to … the county-owned facilities, that is going to devastate our financial picture at the county. …
DW: Switching gears, can you tell me about your business experience as an owner of the Golf Club of Illinois?
TS: My brother and I own the Golf Club of Illinois. Our family, basically, but my brother and I are the main partners in the Golf Club of Illinois. It’s an 18-hole golf club in Algonquin with a driving range and a banquet facility for about 200 people. We’ve owned that since 2003. ... We’ve got a nice facility up here – about 126 acres.
DW: Do you get out to the links often yourself?
TS: Well, I used to. … I think … I got five rounds of golf in all year last year. Between traveling with Bruce and working at the county and keeping everything working at the golf course and my role as GOP chairman, that pretty much took all of my time up. I’ve got a lot of balls in the air. I’m probably working 75 to 85 hours a week. Many days I’ll be downtown at GOP headquarters, I’ll be over at the county building, and then I’ll drive out to Algonquin, and then I’ll drive to Elgin. … Then I’ll be back to Bartlett or I’ll maybe shoot back downtown again.
DW: Do you hope to get out to the course more this year, or spend time on any other hobbies?
TS: Well I love spending time with my family. I’ve got a 14-year-old son, a 22-year-old son and a 26-year-old daughter. I really plan to spend more time with them and get out and play a little more golf [this] year because I love spending time with my family, I like to play golf, and in the last year I haven’t done enough of either of those. So I look forward to perhaps doing more of that.