Election 2011: Village Candidates on Attracting and Retaining Businesses

April 5 is coming up fast. To help you get to know the candidates for the contested Woodridge elections, we asked the candidates for the and the a set of questions. We'll be posting the answers to those questions throughout the week.

As always, check out all of our election coverage at

How would you work to attract businesses to Woodridge?

When a business is looking to start up or relocate, one of the things it looks for is government that doesn’t over-regulate it and is willing to work with it to address issues before they become problems. The best way to attract business is to partner with the current business community and proactively address their issues so that Woodridge will have the reputation as a good place to locate. With I-355 and I-55 running through our village, we have many built in advantages which we need to capitalize on.

I have contacts in India in the I.T. as well as manufacturing sectors of industry.

Village leadership and administration has and will continue to market and promote the positive aspects of doing business in Woodridge, i.e. great location, low tax base, shortening the development review process and most importantly being financially sound.

There is a role to play for the Village in attracting businesses but this is within the greater context of the overall economic climate in Illinois and the US. The only tools that Woodridge has to attract business is to work to reduce local regulations that can add costs to a business when it wants to move or open here and to offer tax breaks. I am in favor of reducing the total number of regulations and requirements but that only does so much when Illinois is not attractive compared to other states. I am supportive of offering sales tax relief to businesses. Other communities use this as a negotiating point as well. If the overall tax burden was less this wouldn’t be necessary to offer tax relief. Communities shouldn’t continue to shift the burden to
residential tax payers to attract business but that is the situation we’re in.