After being left vacant for months, the Kane County Board’s District 2 and 9 seats will officially be filled, after the board on Wednesday voted to approve two women to temporarily fill the seats.
At a special meeting on Wednesday, the board voted in support of selecting Kimberley M. Young to fill the District 2 seat and Jennifer Abbatacola to serve in the District 9 seat.
Young was one of the candidates originally floated for the District 2 seat, a recommendation that previously failed to secure board approval in November. Abbatacola was former District 9 board member Gary Daugherty’s stated pick to succeed him in the role.
These approvals come after months of deliberation among the Kane County Board, and just over a month before the March 17 primary election — during which voters will weigh in on who they want to serve in these board seats, among others.
Kane County’s District 2 board seat has been vacant since early October, when board member Dale Berman died at the age of 91. Berman was a longtime resident of North Aurora and a four-term village president, and had been serving on the Kane County Board since 2021.
The board sought applications for Berman’s seat and made several attempts to appoint someone to fill the seat until it’s up for election in the fall of 2026, but ultimately failed to vote in a candidate in November.
As for District 9, that seat opened after former board member Daugherty resigned in December, citing illness as the reason for his stepping down. The county began seeking candidates to fill Daugherty’s seat later that month, and officially declared the seat vacant in January.
For both seats, an appointment by the board is only set to last through November, per the county, when candidates for both will be voted on by residents of their respective districts in the fall general election.
The timing of the election initially prompted concern from Kane County Board Chair Corinne Pierog, who expressed the opinion that selecting a candidate to fill the seat now would enable that individual to claim to be the incumbent, thereby giving them an edge in the election.
Of the two candidates who were selected on Wednesday, Abbatacola, a Republican, is running in the March primary in advance of November’s election, while Young is not, records from the Kane County Clerk’s Office show. Another Republican candidate, Jeffrey R. Magnussen, is also running in the Republican primary for the District 9 seat, and Marc A. Guttke is running as a Democrat. Three Democrats are currently in the running for the District 2 seat: Ellen Nottke, Martha Davidson and Matthew Dingeldein.
As the selection process stretched on over the past few months, the vacant seats generated some criticism from board members, who took issue with the transparency of the process for appointing a candidate. This issue was also raised the last time the board had to fill a vacancy — the District 7 seat, which was filled in early 2025 by Alex Arroyo, who replaced former board member Monica Silva after she was elected Kane County coroner.
Another issue that arose revolved around state statute, which stipulates that a new county board member has to be approved within 60 days of a vacancy occurring. It has been fewer than 60 days since Daugherty’s resignation, but the seat formerly held by Berman has been vacant for about four months.
In November, when the board failed to approve a District 2 candidate, the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office said it was unclear what would happen if the board passed 60 days without selecting a candidate, but said that the board could bring up a resolution to appoint someone any time before the 2026 general election and that such an appointment would be presumed valid unless challenged.
In January, following the failed recommendations for the District 2 seat, the board revisited the potential appointments, with plans to bring recommendations to the full board in February in advance of the primary election.
Over the past few weeks, ad hoc committees of several board members each meant to review interested candidates met and discussed both vacancies.
At an ad hoc committee meeting in January for the District 9 seat, Pierog addressed the transparency issues that had been raised, saying that she had devised a set of interview questions and a corresponding scoring sheet to standardize the candidate interview process.
At that meeting, board member Clifford Surges asked if the questions and scoring sheet had been used in filling the District 2 appointment, and Pierog said that they had not been made yet, as they were created “specifically because (she) wanted to make sure, per request, that (the board has) ultimate transparency in all matters with the District 9 search committee.”
Surges requested that the board begin using these questions as a “ground zero” or guideline for making appointments to the board that can be improved upon in the future, to which Pierog agreed.
The District 9 search committee, made up of board members Bill Roth, Bill Tarver and Surges, met again on Feb. 2 to interview the candidates under consideration in closed session, and came to unanimous agreement on a ranking of their picks.
As for the District 2 seat, that search committee — made up of board members Deborah Allan, Mohammad Iqbal and Myrna Molina — met in late January to put forward a candidate.
Again at that meeting, concerns about the appointment process arose.
“In trying to be fair to the people who’ve applied for this job and who truly want to serve, and trying to be fair to people who are already on the ballot and are already going door-to-door trying to convince their neighbors to vote for them, and in trying to be fair to the board as a whole so that we are not agonizing over how best to do this,” Allan said, “I’d just like to see if we could get a procedure in place.”
Allan suggested a set of rules within the county that if an election is going to be held within six months, then the board will wait to see who the voters choose, seat them and have them finish out the term. Or, the board could “treat this short-term as if it were a longer-term” when filling a seat, she said, and the Kane County Board chair could put together a committee of people from the board and community to pick a candidate to temporarily fill a seat.
Pierog said she would consider the recommendation, but reminded the committee that she, as the board chair, has “complete autonomy” over the appointment process per state statute. And she emphasized that the board chair’s seat, and all the board members’, will eventually turn over, so any procedures put in place for filling vacancies may change down the line.
“I think it has to be a full board discussion,” Roth said of the board making a set process, and suggesting that, given the time frame, a new board member would not be “up to the learning curve in five weeks.”
Then, on Wednesday, the full county board met to approve the candidates who’d been selected by the search committees.
The appointments of both candidates were ultimately approved on Wednesday, with no board members voting against the recommendations and board member Deborah Allan — who again at Wednesday’s meeting expressed concerns about the selection process and approaching primary — voting “present.”
In an email Friday, Young said that she was “honored” to receive the appointment, and that she plans to “work with the board to continue to make Kane County District 2 and the whole of Kane County … the best place in the world to live. ”
Abbatacola did not immediately return a request for comment.
Both Young and Abbatacola are set to be sworn in and seated at the board’s regular meeting on Tuesday, Pierog said.
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
