Great news, taxpayers: with a projected $4 million shortfall staring down the 2027 budget, on top of which the county may not be able to fund over $3 million in capital projects, including replacing the jail’s failing security cameras, the Administrative Services Committee found time this week to tackle the real crisis facing McHenry County: two extra words on the 2027 holiday calendar.
At Wednesday’s meeting, Member Hendrick moved to strike “Indigenous Peoples Day” from the description of the October 11, 2027 holiday, leaving it simply as “Columbus Day.” The amendment passed 5-1, with all five Republicans on the committee voting yes and the lone Democrat voting no. The full resolution, now minus its Indigenous Peoples Day acknowledgment, then passed by the same 5-1 margin. Somewhere, a calendar vendor is being asked to change one line of text, and county government is treating it like the Treaty of Versailles.
Let’s be clear about what actually happened here. Nobody got a paid day off added or removed. No county service changed. No budget line moved by a single dollar. The entire substance of this amendment was: which words appear next to each other on a wall calendar 14 months from now. That’s the hill five committee members chose to plant a flag on, on a day when the same board is still explaining to residents why their tax bill went up to cover a levy increase the county’s own finance hawks called a broken promise to voters.
For context: the county is heading into 2027 looking at a roughly $4 million budget gap and that’s before you get to the more than $3 million in capital projects that are separately on the chopping block, including new cameras for the jail, needed because the current ones are failing. That’s not an abstract line item. Jail security cameras are the kind of infrastructure that exists to protect detainees, staff, and the county from liability when something goes wrong, and “the current ones don’t reliably work anymore” is not a sentence any county wants attached to its detention facility. Add in the county’s ongoing struggle to fund water supply protection, senior and mental health services, and transportation infrastructure without leaning harder on property taxes, and you have a full plate of real, consequential decisions. That’s the kind of list that’s supposed to eat a committee’s bandwidth: real dollars, real risk, real tradeoffs. Instead, apparently, there was also room on the agenda to relitigate what to call a Monday in October.
The “why” here isn’t complicated. This wasn’t a fiscal question or an administrative cleanup; it was a values statement, dressed up as a scheduling item so it could ride through committee without a public hearing on the merits. Indigenous Peoples Day exists on calendars around the country, including in plenty of Illinois municipalities, as a small, low-cost acknowledgment that Columbus’s arrival wasn’t an unambiguous good for the people who were already here. Voting to delete that acknowledgment doesn’t cost the county anything and doesn’t gain the county anything, except the message it sends about whose history the committee majority feels like recognizing this week. That the vote broke cleanly along party lines, 5-1, tells you it wasn’t really about the words at all.
None of this rises to the level of the county’s real problems. It’s not going to close a $4 million gap, and it’s not going to pay for a single working camera at the jail. That’s exactly the point, and exactly the problem. A committee that has genuinely hard, consequential decisions in front of it, decisions about a multi-million-dollar shortfall, capital projects on the chopping block, and detention-facility security equipment that’s actively failing, chose to spend its time and political capital on a culture-war gesture with zero fiscal or administrative upside. It’s not a serious use of anyone’s time, and dressing it up as a “holiday schedule” item doesn’t make it one.
If the committee has that much bandwidth to spare, McHenry County residents might reasonably ask why it isn’t being spent on the $4 million shortfall, the jail cameras, the water supply, or the senior and mental health services this same board has to fund every year. The calendar was fine the way it was. The 2027 budget isn’t and neither is a set of priorities that finds time for a symbolic culture-war edit but can’t find $3 million for cameras that are supposed to be watching a jail.
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