Chirico continues push to have campaign donation ordinance tossed but others want next council to decide
Naperville Mayor Steve Chirico is unwilling to give up on putting a stop to what he says is outside monetary influences affecting local elections.
Attempts to make the process more transparent and remove big money from Naperville municipal races have done the opposite, he said.
“You’re not getting $500 checks from a friend or neighbor or supporter,” Chirico said at Wednesday’s Naperville City Council meeting, one day after the city election. They’re coming from political action committees with deep pockets, some of which wrote checks to candidates for as much as $20,000, he said.
His solution is to rescind the campaign finance reforms adopted in late 2020 requiring council members to publicly disclose campaign donations of $750 or more when voting on a topic in which the donor has an interest.
The ordinance discourages Naperville residents from contributing to local campaigns over concerns they might be held up to scrutiny, Chirico said.
If no disclosure is made, the council member violates the ordinance. “This is a gotcha ordinance,” Chirico said.
His proposal to revoke the ordinance is to be voted on at the council’s April 18 meeting.
Those who support keeping it say it brings transparency to city politics.
Councilwoman Theresa Sullivan, who championed the reform, said she ran for council in 2019 in part because of a perceived lack of openness among council leadership.
“There was broad support for the council to have a simple, higher standard of transparency, and the ethics ordinance was drafted and passed with that spirit in mind,” Sullivan said.
Last month, Chirico took issue with Sullivan when she failed to notify the council that her Naperville Forward PAC had received union donations before voting with the 7-2 majority on a responsible bidders ordinance, a measure supported by union organizations.
Sullivan countered that because she was not a candidate seeking reelection, she did not have to disclose the $5,000 contribution given to her PAC by the Chicago Laborers’ District Council PAC of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Illinois State Board of Election records show Sullivan’s final campaign report was filed Dec. 29, 2022, and the $587.71 in remaining campaign money transferred to Naperville Forward.
Despite Chirico’s insistence, she said at this week’s meeting there’s no rational or ethical reason for a council with four lame duck members to make a decision on rescinding the ordinance when the next council will take their seats in just a few weeks.
Chirico said the new mayor and council shouldn’t have to fear they’ll be called out for failing to mention a campaign donation.
The best action, he said, is to toss the rules out and let the next council have city staff gather information on the best practices, seek input from the public and come up with an ordinance the entire council can support.
“We should not saddle them with this type of encumbrance on good governance,” he said.
Councilman Patrick Kelly said there’s an easy solution that doesn’t require a new ordinance. Just don’t accept donations that are $750 or higher and turn them down if someone makes the offer, he said.
“It’s not that hard if you don’t take that much money, and you don’t have to do it,” Kelly said.
With the ordinance in place, the onus is on both donors and candidates to be mindful about what kind of money they are giving and taking, he said.
“I think it can result in less money in politics at our local level. It’s not going to get it out all together. That’s just not realistic,” Kelly said.
But to say the ethics ordinance has resulted in more money or darker money, “I just don’t see that at all,” he said.
Of the times the matter has come up on an agenda issue, the disclosure was made and no drama resulted, he added.
As for council members setting up PACs and accepting donations, the problem can be fixed with a sentence, Kelly said. But to repeal the entire ordinance and have the next council deal with creating something new “doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” he said.
Naperville resident Tim Messer also spoke in favor of the council making the ordinance stronger rather than throwing it away.
If the problem is with PACs being directly managed by those on the dais, then add a provision for that, he said.
“Striking the ordinance entirely feels like the easy way out, and I expect my elected officials to do the hard work and make the tough decisions. That’s why I vote, especially in local elections,” Messer said.
The notion that partisan politics are somehow new to nonpartisan races is simply not true, he said.
When Messer ran for office in 2009, he said, things were said and written about him, largely by Republicans, based solely on assumptions made from the primary election ballots he pulled and not on his actual positions on the issues.
“I wasn’t the first to experience that, I’m clearly not the last,” he said.
“To lament the discourse today, while pointing fingers at only one side, seems to me disingenuous at best,” Messer said.
Chirico said his problem is outside money coming into the community from PACs and state parties.
During the just-ended municipal campaign, MORE Political Action Committee-Main Street PAC, of Downers Grove, dumped $35,000 into local campaign funds.
Scott Wehrli’s mayoral bid received $20,000, and $5,000 each went to council candidates Josh McBroom, Nathan “Nate” Wilson and Meghna Bansal, state campaign finance records show.
Mayoral candidate Benny White received $10,000 each from the SMART (Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, Transportation) Local 265 PAC and the LIUNA’s Chicago Laborers’ District Council PAC.
But Chirico also has benefited from such groups.
In the weeks after he was reelected mayor in April 2019, Chirico’s campaign fund collected $21,333 in contributions from outside Naperville, including Main Street PAC, union PACs and businesses like Comcast and senior living developer Avenida Partners, records show.
