The Weight of Consequences

The Weight of Consequences: A MemoirVolume II of the "I Do Solemnly Swear" SeriesHe was elected to balance a budget. What he found nearly broke him.In 2013, Patrick A. Sellers - a virtual unknown - defeated a thirty-six-year incumbent by sixty-four percent of the vote to become Supervisor of Freeport Township, Illinois. He inherited an organization $372,109 in the red, a staff that didn't yet trust him, and a promise he'd made to the people who elected him: he would lead with integrity, or not at all.He didn't know it would cost him this much.The Weight of Consequences picks up where the campaign trail left off and drops readers straight into the fight that followed - a tangled, overpriced building purchase between the Township and a veterans commission that no one wanted investigated; a housing authority quietly abusing the very residents it was built to serve; and a coalition of trustees, former employees, and ordinary citizens willing to risk everything to help him prove it.Along the way, Sellers turns a $372,000 deficit into a budget surplus without cutting a single service. He faces down a hostile board, a wall of political enemies, a body that collapses from exhaustion, and a housing scandal that reaches far beyond the borders of one small Illinois town. Through it all, one oath keeps him standing: so help me God.Told with the same unflinching honesty that made I Do Solemnly Swear essential reading, The Weight of Consequences is a story about what it actually costs to keep a promise once the cameras are gone - and about the family, faith, and stubborn refusal to quit that make it possible.This fight was never just about a budget. And it was far from over.