Editorial: Our choices for City Council: Wards 37-43

Here is the Tribune Editorial Board’s sixth installment of endorsements in contested races for aldermanic seats in Chicago’s Feb. 28 municipal election.

37th Ward

Emma Mitts has been this West Side ward’s alderman for more than two decades. We’ve endorsed her in the past, but we stopped in 2015 after she built a reputation as a “go-along, get-along” alderman, as we’ve put it before. For years, she’s been a rubber-stamp City Council member who never questioned then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s massive borrowing binges. And she’s put up roadblocks to ethics reform instead of embracing it.

Howard Ray has worked at the Chicago Police Department for 25 years. He spent 18 years on the streets, and now works on the department’s administrative side. He says the department needs to get more officers walking a beat. CPD also has to do a much better job responding to calls faster, he says. “Sometimes it takes 48 minutes to get a call answered,” he tells us. Also on the ballot are Jake Towers, an after-school teacher, and community activist Corey Denelle Braddock.

It’s past time for a change in this ward. Ray is endorsed.

38th Ward

Nicholas Sposato has been this Northwest Side ward’s alderman since 2015, and before that he represented the 36th Ward. He’s a former firefighter with conservative views on social issues, and in the past has been open about his support for Donald Trump. When he talks about public safety, he laments that the city is “hamstringing the police we have so that they are unable to do their jobs effectively. We need to back our police and make it apparent that we support them and are behind them.” Embracing police reforms and holding officers accountable for their actions isn’t expressing a lack of support — it’s the right public safety policy.

One of Sposato’s opponents, Ed Bannon, is a stay-at-home dad who for 10 years served as the executive director of the Six Corners Association, a nonprofit focusing on economic development on the Northwest Side. Bannon’s plan for tackling violent crime is smart and layered. He wants a stronger reliance on violence prevention programs, along with expanding the use of mental health professionals to deal with nonviolent 911 calls involving someone in the midst of a mental health crisis. He also says his background in economic development makes him the right person to build up the ward’s tax base.

Also on the ballot are Cynthia Santos, a member of the Illinois Pollution Control Board, who advocates the use of “stop-and-frisk” procedures by police, software engineering manager Franco Reyes and Bruce Randazzo. Bannon is endorsed.

39th Ward

Incumbent Samantha Nugent faces a formidable challenge from Denali Dasgupta, a researcher with extensive experience in human services advocacy. Her background suggests she would fit into the world of city budgets and policymaking with ease. “I’m bringing my own skills as a researcher, a budget enthusiast, and an experienced partner in turning experience into evidence and policy into action,” she says.

Nugent was elected to represent this Far Northwest Side ward in 2019, replacing Margaret Laurino. Since then, she has worked to keep ward residents informed and engaged. She relies on participatory budgeting to ensure citizen involvement in ward spending, and has secured more staffing and security cameras for the ward’s police districts. She’s a believer in community policing, and in relying on the consent decree to bring reform in training, supervision and accountability to Chicago police. Dasgupta’s credential are impressive, but Nugent has capably served her constituents in her first term, and is endorsed.

40th Ward

In 2019, Andre Vasquez unseated a City Council fixture, Patrick O’Connor, who had been the 40th Ward’s alderman since 1983. We don’t agree with several of Vasquez’s progressive stances, but he also has approaches to big problems that we like.

He believes that strong policing starts with accountability. He supported the city’s movement toward giving citizens much greater oversight and input into the Police Department’s operations and policies. “Without transparency and accountability, there can be no trust,” he told us, “so it is up to us to continue holding the department and ourselves accountable.” We also like his reliance on real-time aldermanic alerts to keep residents informed about criminal activity and crime trends.

His opponents are homemaker Jane Lucius and lawyer Christian Blume, an adjunct professor at City Colleges of Chicago. Vasquez is endorsed.

41st Ward

We know that incumbent Ald. Anthony Napolitano has rock-solid support in this Far Northwest Side ward. But we haven’t endorsed him in the past because of what we have said is his abuse of the long-standing, off-the-books power known as aldermanic privilege, used by council members to rule over zoning and permits in their wards. And we can’t endorse him now.

His opponent, attorney Paul Struebing, tells us that small businesses in this ward, which includes Edison Park, Norwood Park and the O’Hare area, had been struggling even before the pandemic. Reviving the ward’s business corridors would be one of Struebing’s top priorities. He also says the city needs to ramp up its replacement of lead service lines to make drinking water in the ward and across the city safer. Our endorsement goes to Struebing.

43rd Ward

This is one of the city’s most competitive aldermanic races. The incumbent, Tim Knudsen, was appointed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot to replace Michele Smith, who stepped down after 11 years of capable, committed leadership of this Lincoln Park ward. Knudsen faces five opponents: small business owner Steve Botsford, consultant Brian Comer, retired lawyer Rebecca Janowitz, businessman Steven McClellan and Wendi Taylor Nations, former chief marketing officer for World Business Chicago.

Two candidates stood out. Botsford says the best way that Chicago can tackle ever-rising violence is to focus on crimes involving shootings. That means improving the Police Department’s dismal clearance rates for solving fatal and nonfatal shootings by hiring more detectives. He says studies show that “the more officers you assign to investigate murders, the higher likelihood you have of solving the crime.”

Comer’s approach entails redeploying officers to “bring more officers out from behind the desk and onto the streets to serve and protect,” along with a heavier reliance on security cameras in crime-ravaged neighborhoods “to see more of what’s happening.” To address CPD’s understaffing problems, he proposes a pilot program with DePaul University in which graduates who commit to joining the Police Department for a four-year stretch would get a reimbursement for one year’s tuition. “You have to dangle a carrot to make (policing) an attractive career again,” Comer says.

One issue that uniquely affects the 43rd Ward is the ongoing construction of the Lincoln Yards mega-development. The project will produce a massive amount of jobs, housing and economic activity for North Side communities, but it also will dramatically ramp up the density and traffic in those neighborhoods. As president of the Sheffield Neighborhood Association, Comer says he speaks regularly with Lincoln Yards’ main developer, Sterling Bay, on traffic impact, as well as to ensure what the developer builds “doesn’t cannibalize what we have over here.”

It’s a strong field, and our endorsement goes to Comer.

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