Amy’s campaign photo, featuring her (literally) winning smile.

Training specialist Amy Sweet won a seat on the Union Grove Village Board in April’s spring election. She will serve a two-year term as trustee on the board, which includes five other trustees and the village president.

“I absolutely love my community,” Amy said of her motivation for running. “And I want to be a part of helping it grow while maintaining the small-town culture and values that make it such a great place to live and raise a family.” She talked to Shorelines about her new role.

What moved you to run for trustee? Have you held an office like this before?
I was the treasurer for the Union Grove chamber of commerce for a few years, but that was not an elected position. Being involved with the chamber and small-business owners in the area was one of my favorite parts of working in Union Grove, though. I really missed it, so when I was approached by another trustee, whom I used to be on the chamber board with, it didn’t take a lot of convincing to get me to run.

What were the campaign and election like?
Definitely intimidating! I met with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and our village president to go over campaign ideas to help me get started. I did a little bit of door-knocking to meet people, but it felt really weird to me — not that I am shy, by any means, but going door-to-door was not my thing. So I decided to do more community functions and connect with people that way. I know a lot of people because of my community involvement and because I worked at the bank branch in town, so it was more about getting the word out that I was running, so people would actually go vote in an election that historically doesn’t have large turnout.

What are your goals for your term?
To get up and running as quickly as possible! There is a lot of research and learning involved in the first few months with a position like this. I’m not the kind of person to walk in and say “I want to do this” until I look into the information available — I want to be able to offer a fresh perspective, so I wanted to keep my mind open until I was given my committee assignments and could look at the available information.

And you had your first board meeting on April 25. How was that?
I learned I will be the chair of the Finance Committee, and I am also on the Parks and Rec Board, the Police Commission, and the Waste Water, Storm, and Sewer Committee. The parks department ran the village park cleanup this past weekend, which ended up being a pretty successful event, even though it was raining!

And we had a big decision at that first meeting to make about allowing backyard chickens. A public hearing was held to collect input from village members, so a few people were there to voice their opinions. There were middle-school kids from 4-H who came in and gave compelling presentations as to why we should allow chickens, which I absolutely loved to see. We passed a resolution to create a backyard chicken ordinance with a 6-1 vote. So now the work begins on putting the ordinance together.