Before his election to the Illinois House in 2012, state Rep. Sam Yingling was the supervisor of his local township in central Lake County, a job with few responsibilities beyond presiding over monthly meetings and administering town funds.

 

Yingling decided to run for that office after an informal fact-finding investigation on behalf of his fellow business owners, who were fed up with the area’s high property taxes. Yingling found that the township represented a “bastion of waste,” one of many units of local government that need not exist.

 

“After being there for about six months, I realized that, yes, this is a totally unneeded layer of government and we should have consolidation,” said Yingling, D-Grayslake. “Unfortunately, the laws that were in place at the time were very, very cumbersome for townships to dissolve. The law was intentionally designed to be difficult for people to consolidate units of government.”

 

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