Editor’s Note: This is one in a series of stories looking at candidates for mayor of Aurora in the Feb. 25 primary election.
Ted Mesiacos, who has served as Aurora’s 3rd Ward alderman since 2013, is running for mayor.
Early voting is currently available for the Feb. 25 primary election, which includes the Aurora mayoral primary. Also on the ballot for mayor of Aurora in the primary are incumbent Richard Irvin, Ald. John Laesch, Karina Garcia, Jazmine Garcia and Judd Lofchie.
Aurora residents will each get to vote for one mayoral candidate, and the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the Feb. 25 primary will move on to the April 1 general election.
Each of the mayoral candidates agreed to an interview with The Beacon-News. In Mesiacos’ interview, he said that he remembers a time when Aurora had a small-town feel, where neighbors knew each other and helped each other out.
Although he said Aurora’s government now acts like its a metropolis, Mesiacos said he believes residents still have that small-town mentality and are still accessible to each other, especially in this age of technology. The city isn’t fully tapped into that primarily because of a communication barrier, he said.
Mesiacos grew up near Aurora’s old Copley Hospital, where he was also born, and was raised primarily by his father after his mother died when he was young. His father, who immigrated to America from Greece through New York City’s Ellis Island, worked second and third shift six days a week to provide for Mesiacos and his brother.
While his father’s responsibility was “to make sure we had enough to survive, my responsibility was to make sure I thrived,” Mesiacos said. Because of that he learned “the heard realities of life at a very young age,” he said.
Mesiacos said he knew from a young age he wanted to be an architect, and although he started working at 15, he still took advanced courses in high school and graduated 14th in his class, he said.
His next stop was the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s architecture program, which he gradated from in 1993. Mesiacos said his plan was to pay off his own student loans, but his father paid them off using his life savings without telling Mesiacos first.
So, when Mesiacos went for his master’s degree, taking night classes at the University of Chicago studying urban planning, he worked two jobs to pay his way through without taking out any loans, he said. One of those jobs was as a full-time architecture intern in Aurora, since Mesiacos had moved back home after college, and the other was as a waiter on the weekends.
When Mesiacos first moved back to Aurora, there were gang wars in the city, he said. So, he got up the courage to tell his father it was time to move away, but his father disagreed, telling him, “if you don’t like where you live, do something about it,” Mesiacos said.
Mesiacos said he convinced his wife, now a teacher in Aurora, to move here despite the city’s issues. They bought the house next to his father’s and raised their family there, giving their kids the chance to grow up next door to their grandfather, he said.
After Mesiacos opened his architectural practice in downtown Aurora, which he has now run for around 18 years, his wife suggested he run for 3rd Ward alderman. While he initially thought she was joking, she eventually convinced him, and he won the election in 2013.
In his time as alderman, one of Mesiacos’ proudest accomplishments has been helping out his neighbors and constituents, he said. People often just knock on his door or just walk up to him to tell him about their concerns, but he said he feels blessed that people feel comfortable doing this.
“That’s what Aurora used to be, once upon a time,” Mesiacos said. “There needs to be accessibility. We’re not a Chicago or a New York or a Los Angeles, where you have multiple layers and it is not realistic for a mayor or alderman to be there.”
Mesiacos said he has helped to bring together city staff and residents when a solution needs to be found, recognizing that neither the city nor the resident are necessarily in the wrong. People need to know they are appreciated and that their tax dollars are working for them, he said.
That’s because “everything starts in the neighborhoods,” according to Mesiacos. He said the community is made from neighborhoods-up, not development-down.
Although development is still important and he has been in favor of it, especially what he called “common-sense development,” the city’s focus should start from the bottom-up, Mesiacos said. One way he said that could be done is by focusing more on the city’s parks.
“We have a lot of community infrastructure projects we’re doing, but what about the day-to-day for the community?” Mesiacos said, suggesting that the city should create a policy to set a limit on funds for development and set aside funds for the things “that the community wants and expects.”
Mesiacos said the city needs to develop a plan for the parks and should be working side-by-side with community organizations like The Friends of Phillips Park to not only raise funds for parks but also to provide insight and support.
Instead of always relying on city taxpayer dollars to address issues, Mesiacos said he would advocate for working together with the community to find solutions that don’t necessarily always involve spending the city’s money. For example, he said the city’s high level of financial support of the Aurora Civic Center Authority has made the organization less motivated to do its own fundraising.
The city also needs to stop the rise in property tax bills and needs to help lower costs in the community, according to Mesiacos. He said Aurora is experiencing an affordability crisis like other cities, so he would make sure that the city is not “spending just to spend to say that we’re doing all these projects like never before.”
Other cities are drawing in development without the financial incentives that Aurora offers, Mesiacos said, so the city should be taking a closer look at development agreements. Plus, the city needs to stop having multiple agreements with the same developers and instead look at why others are choosing not to invest in Aurora, he said.
Aurora’s city government also needs to be more transparent, according to Mesiacos. For example, he said city staff have proposed projects based on a master plan that aldermen have not seen.
“We have to stop telling the community what’s good for them,” Mesiacos said.
According to Mesiacos’ campaign website, he has been endorsed by the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 399, Kane County Board members Dale Berman and Sonia Garcia, Kane County Board Chair Corinne Pierog, Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain, DuPage County Board Chair Deb Conroy, state Sen. Linda Holmes, U.S. Rep. Bill Foster and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, along with Marilyn Weisner, the wife of late former Aurora Mayor Tom Weisner.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
