By Jason Crane
An Aurora mayoral candidate forum Monday, March 1 through the Zoom video conference platform, allowed viewers to learn more about the three candidates seeking the job as mayor of Aurora for the next four years.
An election will be Tuesday, April 6.
League of Women Voters Aurora Area Mayoral Candidate Forum was on the League’s Facebook page.
The candidates are Aurora mayor Richard Irvin, Judd Lofchie, and John Laesch.
Moderator was Barbara Young from the LaGrange Area League of Women Voters.
The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization founded in 1920 that encourages informed and active participation by citizens in government.
It does not support, or oppose, any candidate, or any office. The League sponsors such events, so voters are informed on issues.
Here is the second set of three questions and answers by the candidates after the first set was in the March 4 issue:
• How should the City of Aurora improve efficiency and streamline budgets to reduce or hold the line on taxes while maintaining needed services for the community?
• John Laesch: “My first act in office would be to take a 25% pay cut. That’s not going to change the budget too awful much, but it’s going to set the stage for any other realignment that we have to do with respect to senior management salaries. After setting goals I will be restructuring City government to make sure that we have all the right departments in place to meet the goals that we’ve laid out as a community.
“I will stop the corporate bailouts and instead look at ways to bring money into the community so all our development projects are focusing on energy efficiency and green building. This will relieve the pressure on taxpayers.
“I’m going to look at any of our outsourced contracting and see if we can in source that work and have it done by City employees.
“I’ll build positive relationships at all levels of government, State, federal, and other county elected officials to make sure that we’re out there chasing every dollar we can bring to the city of Aurora.
“Finally, I want to challenge the idea that somehow using taxpayer dollars to move the Casino out to I-88 is a good idea.
“You know the number one tax revenue generator in Naperville is Costco. Why are we instead not trying to bring Costco to Aurora? They pay living-wage jobs and benefits that generate sizeable revenue. That to me seems so much more productive for our community and so much more in line with what I would see as being a good move for our City. Thank you.”
• Judd Lofchie: “I think that our budget is 1,400 pages and if you look at other cities, so for the person who doesn’t want to spend weeks reading it, I think that we could do a summary. Other cities have a shorter summary and I think that would be really important to condense it down so people could understand really what’s going on a little more.
“We’ve added 65 million dollars the last two years to the budget and I think it’s hard to even tell that. If it was in a three-page document like I believe Naperville has, it would be much easier to figure that out.
“I think that we need to keep our spending under control. We need to stop buying assets that are non-performing like the nine houses we paid over a million dollars each by the outlet mall.
“Ten million dollars for vacant land. It costs us about $30,000 a month with no plan in place. I wouldn’t do that. I would get rid of the properties we have!
“We just listed four properties in downtown Aurora with a broker and we said we want them to lease three and sell one.
“When the City owns a building, there’s no property taxes and we have to maintain it. If there’s a break-in, we have to take care of it.
“I would get out of the real estate business, get rid of them all.
“We’ve spent 7 million dollars on two hotels by the outlet mall, those were bringing in 40 or 50 thousand dollars a month.
“So now we’re not only not getting that, we’re paying 30 thousand a month, that’s a $70,000 a month swing. That’s lots of money. I wouldn’t do that.
“I would bid on professional services like the East Aurora School District did, when we use professionals like I.T. and consulting and engineering. Thank you.
• Richard Irvin: “We have a 450 million dollar budget. Matter of fact, we’ve balanced that budget every single year that I’ve been in office, even during a pandemic.
“We have 1.4 billion dollars in assets, and only 1.1 billion in liabilities.
“The majority of those liabilities, 800 million (dollars), are pension liabilities imposed on us by the State.
“So that means our real liabilities are only about a little over 300 million dollars.
“You know when you own a house, if the house is worth 300 thousand dollars, and you only owe 100 thousand dollars, and you’ve already paid off 200 thousand, you know you’re not upside down. You have value in that house.
“We have value in the city of Aurora. Anyone that says when we do economic development, which is the only way to make sure that we can shore up our budget and we don’t put the responsibility on the home-owning taxpayers.
“The only way is to raise the profile and do more economic development. The same kind of economic development we’ve done over the last four years.
“If anyone says the incentives we give these businesses are a bail out, that is a misunderstanding of how municipal government works as in municipal financing!
“If anyone says that these people coming in are getting some benefit of the multi-million dollars they’re investing in our city. That’s a total misunderstanding of how municipal government works!
“The only way that we’re going to be able to ensure our success in the future is continued development. Growth, growth, growth!”
• How can the city of Aurora increase revenues other than through taxation to maintain needed services for the community?
• Judd Lofchie: “As I said, earlier, I brought in a lot of businesses to Aurora. I brought in 30 businesses from recently ReStore, to factories, to restaurants, to day care centers.
“I think it’s important that we bring in new businesses.
“I think we need to streamline the development.
“I built a new dental building in downtown Naperville. It took three meetings for a new building.
“Aurora, it took about six or seven for a new project. So we need to streamline that to get businesses open. Taxes will be start being paid and jobs will be created. We need to do that!
“I have an office downtown and we used to have a facade matching program and an interior matching program many years ago.
“With the facade, you would get $10,000 to fix up the building and the interior you could get up to $75,000 matching if you put in electric or plumbing, the main things.
“We need to beautify downtown. We need to light it up and clean it up.
“Downer (Place) is a great street, but Broadway, where my office is where you might hear the train go by because it’s so loud is not so great and it’s like a racetrack and we need to work on that.
“We need to create the infrastructure to get people down here, to get businesses down here.
“I think we have high speed internet which is a huge wasted asset. We have this OnLight 40-mile ring around the City of high-speed internet. We’re not using it!
“We have a really hard time with our AT&T. We can’t get Comcast. We need to use the assets we have like the airport. We have this great airport but we don’t use it.”
• Richard Irvin: “Economic development. Same answer as the last question that you asked. Economic development, growth, growth, growth.
“The only way we’re going to be able to continue to grow as a city is if we have the development needed to come in to take the burden off of the homeowner who has carried this burden for generations in the city of Aurora because of our lack of economic development.
“You can’t just say ‘let’s have economic development or let’s bring Costco into the city of Aurora’. It’s not that simple!
“What we have to do is change the image and perception of the City. We have to focus on safety and crime.
“We’ve got to focus on education. People move into a city and buy a home. The first thing a person asks when moving into a city is how’s the school district going to treat my kid?
“What are they going to do to make sure my kid has an educational future?
“We’ve been talking about that. We addressed that. What we did is we created the education commission.
“As a matter of fact, we went to the next step and created the youth commission to give the young people a voice right here in the city of Aurora.
“So with the youth commission, education commission, focusing on public safety, focusing on economic development we’ve raised the profile of the city of Aurora and brings the development in that we need to take the burden off of our homeowners in the city of Aurora.”
• John Laesch: “I just want to be clear that I’m going to be the mayor for the people, not the mayor for the developers!
“I definitely think that if you look at a city like Naperville, they don’t have to dole out millions of dollars in taxpayer money to get businesses to come in to Naperville because there’s disposable income there.
“That’s why the core of my campaign is focusing on bringing in better paying jobs to address the 12 percent poverty rate that Aurora has.
“A center piece of my campaign is a concept of a Green New Deal for Aurora. We have 10 years to act, scientists have told us that, to address the climate crisis.
“We have people living in poverty that need better paying jobs.
“This is at the center piece. I would start by creating a department of sustainability that works with Aurora businesses and homeowners to find the available resources to make peoples homes more energy efficient and move us to renewal energy.
“There will be jobs air sealing. Jobs installing solar panels. Jobs installing new windows and doors. Doing gut/rehab work, a lot of construction with light technology jobs if we get the window and door companies to come here.
“I believe that if we target the training and certifications towards the people who are working a dead-end job at McDonald’s, people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. People who slipped through the cracks in our education system. People who are re-entering society after serving time.
“If we train Aurora folks to get these jobs, we’re going to keep that money in our local economy.
“That is what I would do to focus to strengthen our local tax base. Thank you.”
• What is your vision for ensuring both social justice and security for the community?
• Richard Irvin: “I have more than a vision. We actually have implementation of social justice!
“First of all, we have to make sure we are a transparent government.
“A government that our average resident can Google and go on our website and see what Aurora has going on.
“One of the first things we did when we came in was we created a portal where our residents can simply just contact the city of Aurora with any kind of issues that they want.
“We would, depending on what that issue is, address that issue almost immediately.
“We also made a portal for our police department. So if anyone had a question, about whether or not a police officer was getting punished for some ill contact they had with a resident, it’s right there for everybody to see.
“We created what’s called the C.H.A.N.G.E. Initiative. That’s Citizens Helping Aurora’s Necessary Growth and Empowerment. Not just with the Police Department, but dealing with the whole city, so we can talk to our residents, one on one, to see what it is they think we should be doing to make Aurora a better place.
“As a matter of fact this past Summer we had over 10 community meetings. Ten! The last six of them I went to personally and listened to what our residents had to say, and how they were saying it, and what was important to them so we could address them in this administration and we did just that!
“They said they wanted body cams. We got body cams.
“They said they wanted a civilian review board, so we started a civilian review board.
“We are addressing issues head on!”
• John Laesch: “So let’s go back to the protests and riots on May 31. To me, this epitomizes the intersection of social justice and economic justice and our community’s safety.
“When people are frustrated because the system doesn’t work for them, and so frustrated that hundreds gather for a rally.
“We need to look at the root causes of that protest. It was not just George Floyd. It’s systemic racism that continues to oppress people here in the city of Aurora and across the United States.
“We need to address the root causes of the civil unrest in our community and at the core of that is access to a good paying job and opportunity without harassment by the police.
“We have to not only focus on physical security, but we need to address income insecurity, housing insecurity.
“We need to think about everyone in our community and make sure that everyone feels safe but also has access to a living wage job. I think that is when we start to reduce crime.
“The ACLU had a study showing that 79% of the crime in Illinois is connected to crimes of survival.
“If you look at all the communities around us, the ones with more household income have a lower crime rate.
“These things are all inter-connected and as mayor, I’ll be fighting to make sure that we are a living wage city. Thank you.
• Judd Lofchie: “I think we need to have a better relationship with the police and the citizens of Aurora.
“I think the police are good, I think the citizens and the police need to work together better.
“Reverend Dan Haas had a program that he presented and worked with Dr. Holloway called Everyday Democracy.
“It’s a national program that’s sort of like Study Circles, each alderman appoints 10 people and there’s 10 groups of 10, throughout the City.
“They meet and they have diverse groups and I think it’s an eight week program to try and work together.
“They hire people, it’s supposed to be really good and we didn’t do that because we couldn’t come up with the money but when you think about it, what did it cost for the riots?
“What did it cost these businesses?
“How many jobs did we lose?
“We have to do this kind of thing!
“We have to not just give lip service to it.
“This whole C.H.A.N.G.E. initiative was great, but people got up and complained about the police. The police said here’s what happened but when the hour was up, everybody was out of there!
“We need to talk, we need to sit together and work together and I don’t believe that’s happening!
“The police are not allowed to talk to the alderman right now and I think that’s terrible, I would certainly change that!
“We need to be more inclusive and put all the people together at the table.
“I would create more jobs with the minority set aside program.
“We spend $250,000 and we’re going to study it for a year. I wasn’t for that, I voted for it because it was better than nothing. I think we should just do it!
“We know there’s an issue. If we could get these people better jobs, it would be better for Aurora!”
The Voice will have more campaign coverage in the next several weeks.