What does the County Executive Do?

Only two out of 102 Counties in Illinois have an elected County Executive.

Oversees the administration of the County’s business, similar to the Mayor at the city level or the Governor at the state level.
Supervises all county activities that do not fall under the responsibility of another elected county official.
Working with the County Board, the County Executive provides input for board agendas and presides over full board meetings.
Represents the county on intergovernmental boards and committees, participates in regional economic development efforts and advocates for legislative action at the state and federal level that will benefit county residents.

The text above is from the current County Website, which has more details: https://www.co.champaign.il.us/countyexecutive/countyexecutive.php

Here are some outstanding documents with more details about the office.

An article written by the first Champaign County Executive, Darlene Kloeppel - reprinted with permission by its author: https://sanfordforce.org/article-what-does-the-county-executive-do
In 2022, the League of Women Voters of Champaign County organized a task force to review several aspects of our County’s government:
- Here is the overview page - scroll to the bottom in the section “Past Issues” https://www.lwvchampaigncounty.org/local-issues.html
- This is the task force’s summary - see “Part 2: County Governance” on page 4: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hxkAObKBhXwNsK2y1dHm2OgvcYjK1vvo/view
- Here is the outside consultant’s findings - see pages 14 - 20 including an interesting discussion of Home Rule on page 20: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AvBCYjL7WWR9T5Bmckgyv58u8Iq2u2Wj/view
The position was created through a referendum in 2016. This was the justification at the time: https://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/guest-commentary/3-reasons-to-elect-county-executive/article_b47ad78e-6683-5142-85c3-36c33cda120a.html (Yes - it’s behind a paywall. If it’s inaccessible please consider subscribing to the News-Gazette! We want to prevent our community from becoming another “news desert.”)