Newcomers for trustee on VIP slate

Brookfield's VIP Party announced the remainder of its 2009 slate via e-mail and online video over the weekend. With a pair of political veterans, Wil Brennan and Bill Russ, already on the ticket as the party's candidates for president and clerk respectively, the three trustee candidates are all new.

The candidate who may be the best known of the three is Leanne Digan, who has been a member of the Brookfield Zoning Board of Appeals for several years. Her running mates for trustee will be Richard "Dutch" Kostelnik, an Army veteran who served both in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2006-07, and Timothy W. Heilenbach.

Both Digan and Kostelnik appear in a video announcement of the VIP slate, which began running late last week.

Digan called for the village to spend its money more wisely and decried the one-party rule of the current PEP-dominated board, saying board members should be "more representative of our residents here in Brookfield."

Meanwhile, Kostelnik said in the video that he is a lifelong resident of Brookfield and had served many years in Chicagoland chambers of commerce. He said he wants to leverage the popularity of Brookfield Zoo as a major regional attraction to help improve business in Brookfield.

Heilenbach does not appear in the video. However, in the final segment of the video, which appears to introduce the slate as a package, former trustee Linda Stevanovich is present.

When asked if there was a late switch in fielding the slate, John Gallagher, VIP's nomination chairman and vice president, said Stevanovich was never part of the slate.

"She was just there when they were filming it," Gallagher said. "It was incidental."

Brennan laid out two major themes for VIP's campaign in his segment of the video, saying he had "serious apprehensions about the direction that our government is taking us."

He characterized Brookfield's spending as "spiraling out of control" and called village staff salaries "excessive."

Such a combination, Brennan said could lead to a loss of services and tax increases.

The salaries of village management were a key issue during the 2007 election, in which Brennan and Russ both ran as candidates for trustee. Another issue that surfaced in that campaign-that village staff were impersonal and treated residents with a "my way or the highway" approach-is part of the 2009 campaign as well.

Russ, in his video segment, called the VIP platform one that will "bring back common sense to village government."