Jan Quillman All Smiles: 'Number Three Is Better Than Nothing'

JOLIET — The voters of Joliet do not seem interested in enacting term limits for the politicians, that was apparent on Tuesday night when Jan Quillman gathered at McBride's On 52 to celebrate her unofficial victory to a sixth term on the Joliet City Council.

In an interview with Quillman at McBride's, she had a lot to say, especially about the people who had tried to take her down. The top three unofficial vote getters were Joe Clement, Juan Moreno and Jan Quillman, all three candidates had the backing of trade and labor unions.

"And his has been the hardest, most difficult, nastiest, nastiest campaign I've ever been in," Quillman told Joliet Patch. "I've never had people come at me like they did this time and I think they were just afraid, I don't know why, but I got blamed for everything and most of it was untrue and I can prove it but they don't want to believe it. People want to believe the stories so I want to thank all the people that believed in me and know who I am and how honest I truly am. It came through tonight, and number three is better than nothing," Quillman smiled.

Joliet Patch asked Quillman if there any falsehoods or untruths that were being spread about her during the campaign.

"I got accused of kicking people off by paying people for votes or something like that," Quillman revealed. "And I don't know what the whole thing was. I had nothing to do with that. They said, my petitions on my D-2s showed that, well no, that's because I had to go and get a second set of petitions out because my first set were invalid, and I knew I was going to get challenged by it so I went out and had to get more and then when I did it on my D-2s, that would have showed, that I had to get more, on my D-2s, but they twisted it and said I had people kicked off, they were kicked off the ballot and I truly had nothing to do with that. You know, people are going to believe what they want to believe, and I thank the people that didn't believe that because they know me and the other part was I got accused of being a racist and that was totally false, and I could prove that as well and it turned out that the people came forth for me and supported me in that and I truly believe and I'm thankful to the people who believed the truth and not believed the lies and that has never happened to me before. I think it hurt me with third place, but that's okay, third place is better than no place."

The other people on the ballot were Glenda Wright McCullum and Damon Zdunich. There were also two write-in campaigns led by Jim Lanham and Larry Crawford.