Moore off and running with first campaign event

QUINCY — There was not baton or torch involved, but State Representative Randy Frese (R-Quincy) certainly made it clear he wants former Quincy mayor Kyle Moore to take his place in the Illinois Statehouse.

“Over the course of the past eight years in, in my duties as a state representative, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Kyle on a number of issues,” Frese said. “Early on, it was straight line winds where trees came down, power lines down, and many people without power for quite a quite a while. Kyle put a team together. He had to get to figure out where the money was going to come from and organize all the volunteers because that’s what this community is all about.”

Frese also touted Moore’s efforts as mayor in working with the state on the Illinois Veterans Home following the Legionella outbreak, which has led to $250 million in investment into the facility, and negotiating through the Pandemic.

“Kyle put a plan together that was actually ended up being used by Governor Pritzker to set goals and if we can achieve these goals then we can open up,” Frese said. “He’s gonna make just a wonderful state representative for this area.

The Republican Moore held his first fundraising event Thursday night at the Dick Bros. complex at 929 York where Frese introduced him. A solid crowd was on hand with their checkbooks at the ready.

Moore said he was undaunted by seeking the 99th District seat in the Illinois House of Representatives, despite Republicans being in the super minority in the General Assembly, meaning Democrats have veto-proof majorities in both chambers.

“I ran for city council when who nobody knew who I was,” he said. “I was facing a two-term incumbent (John Spring) and a Republican had not won the mayor’s office since my favorite mayor, C. David Nuessen..You know, it wasn’t that long ago that Quincy had over six decades of Democrat control of our city council, six decades. We had almost three decades of Democratic control of our mayor’s office.”

Moore was elected mayor in 2013 and Nuessen left the office in 1985. Moore was also part of the GOP wave that took over the Quincy City Council from Democrat control in the 2010’s.

Moore talked about wanting to make the General Assembly more accountable.

“For example, the Safe-T Act. You know, this is a law that was passed in the dead of the night with little input from our sheriffs, from our police departments from our State’s Attorneys. And now you can go on muddyrivernews.com pretty much every week and our state’s attorney’s office or law enforcement community are talking about the detrimental effect of that Safe-T Act. And what would that have been had the General Assembly only asked the law enforcement community beforehand what those effects would be?

“You know, when I was mayor, we had a state of emergencies. But we had a check and balance system. We had to go to the city council over five days if we had a state of emergency and we had to get their input and their approval for anything that we wanted to do. But yet during COVID-19 We had nearly two years of state of emergencies from our Governor and the General Assembly totally abdicated their responsibilities. That my friends is not good and that is why we need a good representative to hold those actions accountable.”

Moore faces Republican Eric Snellgrove of Beardstown in 99^th District Republican Primary on March 19. The 99th stretches from Quincy to Jacksonville and includes portions of Adams, Brown, Cass, Morgan and Schuyler counties.