Will County Gazette

The Bolingbrook village board recently voted on a couple of changes to update the village's administrative code.

During a Nov. 15 village board meeting, the board passed a few amendments to the village code, two of which deal with the board and administration and how they run their meetings. The village has been working lately to clean up a lot of their language in the village code, make sure there was nothing changed in the budget or elsewhere and not added into the code, and just bring some of the language up to 2022 standards.

The first ordinance regarding village code was regarding chapter one of the village handbook, and just updated some general terms that are used throughout the code to make the handbook more comprehensive and accessible. The second ordinance dealt with language in the second chapter of the handbook, which affects how the village board runs its council meetings.

The rest of the meeting was clean up, but the board did propose a change that would allow an omnibus agenda vote in the village council meetings. The vote, or consent agenda, is used by many other municipalities in the state and across the country and allows for all routine or noncontroversial to be voted on in a meeting with a single roll call vote, rather than a vote for each item. Members can still pull a matter out if they wish to speak on it separately, but otherwise, it is simply a time-saving and simplification for council meetings. 

"What they’ll do is list the items that are under the consent agenda and if there’s any discussion about it, typically there’s not, that’s how they work. They don’t go into a detailed explanation of each item they just list out the items and they’ve been reviewed and they’re part of public record as well," Village Board Trustee Michael Lawler said at the meeting.