With a new president sworn into office this week, Waukeganites can now turn their attention to the 2025 mayoral election. The city primary will take place just over a month from now.
Residents got early Christmas presents in December as mayoral candidates’ large campaign signs began mushrooming in neighborhoods and sprouting on empty lots. The city’s reputation for rough-and-tumble politics also kicked off last month with two challenges to Mayor Ann Taylor’s independent candidacy.
The primary is set for Feb. 25; the general election ironically for April 1, the date most Lake County voters head to their respective polls to elect city, village, township, school and other local officials. In Waukegan, candidate filings for the primary were over in October, while filing for independents ended in November. City Council members are not up for election until 2027.
There is a Democratic primary contest for mayor, pitting former Mayor Sam Cunningham, the city’s first Black chief executive, and Miguel Rivera Sr., who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2021. Harold Beadling, a former 4th Ward alderman, is unopposed in the Republican primary.
City Clerk Janet Kilkelly is unopposed in the primary and in the general election, which means she should be re-elected to another four-year term after charges against her of violating state law were dismissed last month, although a notice of appeal has been reported. Long-time City Treasurer John Schwab is being challenged for the post by Gene Decker, a retired Waukegan Fire Department deputy chief.
So far in the mayoral race, it has been Taylor who has been the top target of challenges to her re-election attempt. Independent mayoral candidate, 6th Ward Ald. Keith Turner, along with political gadfly Margaret Carrasco, filed objections to her candidacy petitions last month.
Since 1997, when Bill Durkin was re-elected mayor, Waukegan voters have chosen six one-term mayors following decades of steady leadership at the helm of Lake County’s county seat. Taylor, the city’s first woman mayor, defeated Cunningham in 2021.
As the incumbent, Taylor is the candidate opponents are going after and she surely understands “politics ain’t bean-bag,” as Chicago writer Finley Peter Dunne once declared. The three-person Waukegan Electoral Board heard the objections to her petitions at several hearings and ruled on them on Dec. 17.
Turner, first elected to the City Council in 2019, and Carrasco both zeroed in on the address listed on Taylor’s candidacy petitions, contending in their filings that she violated state election codes for putting her “legal address” as Waukegan despite her mailing address being Libertyville. In truth, Taylor does live in Waukegan, just like some city residents on the far Northwest Side have Wadsworth postal addresses.
Some may recall Turner as the alderman who posted a since-deleted photo of a young Milwaukee woman’s severed arm on his “Friends of Keith Turner” mayoral campaign Facebook site last spring. The arm, one of a series of the woman’s body parts scattered around the region, was found May 11 on the city’s Lake Michigan shoreline.
That stunt moved his fellow City Council members to censure him in a 6-3 vote, calling his questionable posting unauthorized, insensitive and disgraceful. The censure hasn’t stopped Turner from seeking the mayoral post.
In his filing against Taylor’s re-election campaign, which also included contending the mayor filed too many petition signatures, the city’s Electoral Board, comprised of 5th Ward Ald. Edith Newsome, who chaired the panel, City Clerk Kilkelly and 1st Ward. Ald. Sylvia Sims Bolton, dismissed his and Carrasco’s objections.
Various judicial rulings across the nation have focused on the election premise that candidates have wide leeway when filing their petitions in order to give voters election choices, and that minor errors are not enough to remove candidates from ballots. The Electoral Board unanimously held to those legal decisions and rejected Turner’s allegations.
According to the board’s decision, members noted there was, “sufficient evidence that the Candidate’s ‘place of residence’ in both reality and for the purposes of the Election Code, is in the City of Waukegan.” Carrasco’s objection, which made similar allegations, also was dismissed by the board.
Unless the two appeal the board’s ruling to judicial review in Lake County Circuit Court, Taylor remains on the ballot, which leaves an interesting scenario for the April municipal election. There will be a Democrat, a Republican and two independents on the mayoral ballot.
Four candidates vying for the post may either end with the first mayor making the grade in 28 years and being re-elected to a second term, or Waukegan voters continuing to be fickle and making another sitting mayor a one-term officeholder.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
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