Tazewell County candidates square off in new 87th House District

Two Tazewell County political leaders will square off in the Republican primary for the new 87th House District for a spot in the new Illinois General Assembly.

County Treasurer Mary Burress will face anesthesiologist and county board member Bill Hauter in the June 28 contest for an open seat that had initially been split between Rep. Tim Butler, who is running in the new 95th District, and Rep. Keith Sommer, who is retiring after 24 years in the Statehouse.

Burress has been treasurer since 2010 and ran in 2020 against state Sen. Dave Koehler, D-Peoria, in the 46th Senate District. She lost to the incumbent by over 6,000 votes – the closest race Koehler has had since being elected in 2006.

Hauter works at OSF St. Francis Medical Center as a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist. He also serves on the Tazewell County Board, having been elected in 2020.

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The new district, northeast of Springfield, will contain much of the eastern part of Butler's old district, featuring east Sangamon County along Interstate 72, including Mechanicsburg, Illiopolis and Buffalo. It goes into Logan and Tazewell counties and the northern part of Sommer's district in Tazewell. It also loops into parts of Macon and DeWitt counties.

Despite containing parts of suburban Peoria – including East Peoria, Morton and Creve Coeur, all of which swung toward Democrats in the 2020 presidential election – the district is strongly Republican. Former President Donald Trump won the district by 36 points in 2020, just slightly less than his 38-point victory over Hillary Clinton within the district in 2016.

Both Republican U.S. Senate candidates won in the district, with former Sen. Mark Kirk winning by 37 points in 2016 and former DuPage County Sheriff Mark Curran winning by 31 points in 2020. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner won by 32 points in 2018, but third-party candidates received around 12% of the vote within the district.

Burress is fighting for the state to be more friendly to business. As someone who works to collect her county's property taxes each year, she hears from constituents about the rate at which they are being taxed and about their complaints about the cost of living in Illinois.

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"I've seen (over) the last 12 years the harm that it has done," Burress said. "We have taxed our way out of debt (and) the mandates have caused so many businesses to close their doors. That's what it seems Illinois is good for: another mandate or taxing people or businesses out of the state.

"I've heard it every year when we collect property taxes and I said, 'You know, I want to be the strong voice to stand up and say, enough is enough.' The best thing Illinois has is the people and we can't keep running them out of the state."

She's also motivated by her late husband, who was a former police chief in Pekin. She criticized the suite of criminal-justice reform bills passed last year, blaming them for decreasing public safety and putting people's lives at risk.

"I can't imagine being married to an officer in today's environment," Burress said. "When the SAFE-T bill was passed at 4 a.m., that is corruption at its finest. It is harming our beautiful communities. We need to bring safety back; we need to stop demoralizing our police officers. Stop letting criminals back out on our streets and let the police officers do their job."

Hauter's motivation came from the mandates placed on citizens early in the COVID-19 pandemic. As a physician, he says that he has an interesting perspective on the mandates and felt that they were counter-productive to actually putting the pandemic in the rear-view mirror.

"I became motivated and compelled by what I see as a COVID tyranny," Hauter said. "They have made it so one man (Gov. JB Pritzker) decides what businesses stayed open (and) which ones failed, schools that stayed open or closed (or) how many people we could have at a worship service (and) where we could travel if we had a vaccination passport.

"This COVID tyranny, which was counter-productive, really compelled me to run for this office."

Like Burress, he's concerned about the state of the economy and how the state can build an environment of growth. He wants to focus on continued reforms to the state's pension system, saying that further reform to the state's property tax system is linked to pension fixes.

"There needs to be an actual constitutional pension reform movement," Hauter said. "There needs to be implementation of Tier 3 (pensions) and it does not have a date for implementation; it just needs to be implemented. That's promising what we promised--we keep our promises to the people that we promised it to, but it (also) saves so much money being a hybrid model."

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Both candidates have similarities on how to better run the state's elections; both, for instance, support a voter ID law. However, they disagree on how the 2020 presidential election went. Burress believes that Trump won – he did not – and says that some voters believe that the election was unfair to their side.

"They feel that securities were not in place," Burress said. "I've certainly heard a lot about ballot harvesting and I think it would put so many people at ease if we brought back voter ID. You have to have an ID for everything – you have to have a FOID card to buy a gun. Why do we not have voter ID?

Hauter, despite his concerns, says that Biden won and that there wasn't any kind of widespread fraud that would have changed the overall outcome of the race.

"I (do) think there were irregularities, especially when it comes to mail-in ballots being mailed unsolicited to people and how they were harvested," Hauter said. "(However), I believe that Joe Biden is our president and I believe Trump lost."

Both candidates are friendly and each respects the other for the work they put in for the county. However, each has a different idea of how they will approach their job should they be elected to the General Assembly.

Burress said that she will be a "full-time" representative, saying that it is too large of an area for a politician to try to work two separate jobs.

"You are dealing with every person's everyday life," Burress said. "If you are not in session, you need to be out working with those constituents, talking with them, listening to them, talking to farmers – agriculture is the biggest industry in Illinois – we need to listen to their concerns. 'What can I do for you as a legislator?' That needs to be done full-time."

Hauter, on the other hand, says that he will keep his role as an anesthesiologist, stating that he doesn't want to make being in the legislature his entire livelihood.

"It (used) to be that you went down there, you represented your district and you returned and your livelihood was in your community," Hauter said. "I'm going to be a full-time representative but I'm going to continue to work part-time as a physician because I think that's so important to be involved in your community. Your identity and livelihood is home, it's in your district, your home, your family and your community."

Contact Zach Roth: (217) 899-4338; ZDRoth@gannett.com; @ZacharyRoth13

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Illinois primary: Tazewell County candidates face off in 87th District