During Aurora Mayor John Laesch’s inauguration speech on May 13, he said not to “look for me to impress anyone in my first 100 days.”
Now looking back on those 100 days, Laesch agrees with his past self-assessment. He told The Beacon-News in an interview on Tuesday, two days before his official 100th day in office, that he hasn’t done any “media events or anything like that” to create an “aura of change,” and that he didn’t expect to rush anything through in his early days.
Instead, Laesch said he has resolved during his first year in office to work on financial stability for the city, on addressing residents’ concerns that he believes have gone unaddressed from before he was elected and on the city’s communications and responsiveness to residents.
While he has been steadily putting in place building blocks toward his own goals, like sustainability and affordable housing, Laesch has also been dealing with many of the decisions made by the former administration, he said, which has “overshadowed what I think we have the potential to be as a city” and is “more frustrating than fun.”
Laesch won the mayoral seat over former Mayor Richard Irvin in the April 1 consolidated election, an ostensibly nonpartisan race that nonetheless saw significant spending from the state Democratic party in Laesch’s favor and which many considered to be divisive.
The win over a sitting mayor was rare for Aurora. The last time an incumbent elected mayor conceded defeat in an election was in 1997, but even then David Pierce withdrew ahead of that year’s consolidated election after what he saw as a lackluster showing in the primary to opponent David Stover.
Laesch was one of Irvin’s fiercest critics. Over the past several years, including when he first ran for mayor against Irvin in 2021 and during his time on the Aurora City Council starting in 2023, he was a vocal opponent of many projects and programs put forward by the Irvin administration.
On election night, Laesch told The Beacon-News that as mayor he was going to push “aggressively” toward what he spoke about during his campaign: “a government and economy that works for everybody.”
The city’s financial state was discussed by Laesch and other candidates during the mayoral campaign leading up to the April 1 election, but it has been a particular focus of his since the moment he took office.
During his inauguration speech, Laesch said the city has been left in “serious debt” because of past mayors’ investment in revitalizing Aurora’s downtown, although he noted he wanted to continue that progress. His administration’s number one priority would be to get the city’s “financial house in order,” he said at the time.
Aurora has since started the budgeting process for 2026, and Laesch said recently that the city is facing a “significant hole” between revenue and expenses in that budget based on early analysis. However, city officials have not yet given specific numbers on the projected 2026 budget gap.
Laesch told The Beacon-News Tuesday that he still feels like the city’s finances are his administration’s first priority.
“We’ve got a lot of hard decisions ahead, but we’ve made some,” he said. “We’ve shifted some priorities around on spending and taken some early emergency steps, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”
One thing Laesch has done to cut back on the budget is cancel the proposed City of Lights Center project that he said would have cost around $250 million, though earlier projections placed the price between $100 million and $120 million. He spoke against the project during his campaign, and days after being elected he told The Beacon-News that the project was “pretty much dead.”
Other planned projects have been delayed or scaled back by Laesch’s administration in an effort to balance the budget, such as a rework of Broadway’s streetscape and a redesign of downtown’s Millennium Plaza. Other cost-cutting measures have also been put in place, Laesch has previous said.
One notable expense the city is looking to not have in the 2026 budget is funding for the Aurora Civic Center Authority, which owns and operates the Paramount Theatre, Copley Theatre, Paramount School of the Arts and North Island Center plus manages the city-owned RiverEdge Park and Stolp Island Theatre.
In recent years, the city financially supported the Aurora Civic Center Authority using federal COVID-19 relief funds, which are no longer available. But the Civic Center Authority was facing a multi-million-dollar gap in its 2026 budget, and under the former Irvin administration, the city was considering filling that gap as part of a larger plan to make the organization financially self-sufficient again, according to past reporting.
The canceled City of Lights Center project was also a part of that plan, though Laesch has said that it didn’t make sense to him or others and that the price was just too high.
The city of Aurora, now led by the Laesch administration, recently told the Civic Center Authority it would be getting far less than previously discussed, which prompted the Authority to put on hold the Paramount’s Bold Series of shows after the final performance of its current production, “True West,” on Aug. 31 at the Copley Theatre in downtown Aurora.
More cuts may also be coming, depending on how much funding Aurora eventually agrees to, Civic Center Authority officials have said.
Since the Civic Center Authority announced the cuts, the city has faced pushback in particular from the Actor’s Equity Association, a labor union that represents over 50,000 professional actors and stage managers, as well as from members of the Aurora City Council.
In a statement at the time, Laesch called the Aurora Civic Center Authority’s decision to put the Bold Series on hiatus “difficult” but also one that “certainly reflects a positive, forward-thinking approach to ACCA’s pursuit of long-term sustainability.”
The city has offered the Civic Center Authority “a path towards adding a regular subsidy into the general fund,” but that “will take an effective partnership and a collaborative, clear plan towards long-term financial stability,” Laesch said in the statement.
He previously told The Beacon-News that his administration has made suggestions to the Aurora Civic Center Authority on ways to become more financially stable, plus that he has been consistent in calling for that, including during his time as an alderman at-large on the Aurora City Council.
However, unlike when Laesch was sitting on the Aurora City Council, he now has to be a “cheerleader” for the Authority and the city’s theaters, and to actively raise money to make sure people can continue to see the shows they put on, he said.
That’s an example he gave during an interview Tuesday to explain how this new role has challenged him to grow.
Laesch said he can’t just be a “no” vote anymore when he disagrees with something, even though he feels like he often tried to present alternative solutions. Now, he has the “pretty tremendous task of running the city,” he said.
Coming into the mayoral role, Laesch knew he was “walking into a mess,” he said,” but he “didn’t know it would be this big.” He later clarified that he was talking in particular about the city’s finances.
At a recent town hall meeting, during a presentation about the city’s financial issues, Laesch highlighted a few places where costs are going up, such as in yearly debt payments. The city’s debt has now reached $327 million, he said at the time, and so the city now has to spend an extra $7 million each year to pay that down.
The Aurora City Council has approved over $100 million in additional debt this year and late last year through the sale of bonds to finance construction projects from new fire stations to renovations at RiverEdge Park. Though some of the debt was taken out under Laesch, all of the projects to be funded through the bonds were approved by the Aurora City Council under the former Irvin administration.
While he knew the city was in debt, Laesch said in his interview Tuesday that he didn’t know there were so many unfunded projects going on. For example, he learned on his second day in office that the city’s Information Technology Department was $6.3 million over budget this year, primarily because of what he said were “absolutely necessary” upgrades made to police and fire communications equipment, plus the “excellent” new 311 initiative, he said at the recent town hall meeting.
Because of the debt, the city will likely see “yet another property tax increase” in 2026, Laesch said during his inauguration speech.
While any potential increase has yet to be determined, since it would involve the city’s 2026 budget which is still being developed, the Aurora City Council has under Laesch’s administration voted to double the city’s hotel tax starting in the new year, the first time the tax has risen since it was put in place, and has discussed potentially continuing a 1% tax on groceries within city limits that is set to expire statewide at the end of this year.
In another potential blow to the city’s budget, Aurora was set to get a special census earlier this year to make up for a perceived undercount in the 2020 census that officials have said is costing the city millions of dollars in lost tax revenue each year, but it was delayed by the federal government the day before the kick-off event was planned.
Months later, and with the city now under Laesch’s administration, the U.S. Census Bureau gave the city a new date for a special census that would have given the city less than a month to get the word out, so for that reason and other issues, the city further delayed it.
Laesch has previously emphasized that he would be looking to grants to help fund city projects, especially those that match his priorities around sustainability. And, he said in the interview Tuesday that those projects already awarded state funding would be a high priority, along with those projects the city really needs, so that the grant funds are not lost.
One project with pending state funding that Laesch said will be a priority going forward is the Orchard Road sound wall, which has been in the works for years. Both that project and residents’ issues with the HelloFresh facility on the West Side are examples of concerns Laesch said he inherited from the previous administration but is prioritizing.
Laesch has taken several steps to better hear from and communicate with residents, including with his recent Community Listening and Action Town Halls. While nothing he heard at those listening tours dramatically changed his priorities, he said, people seemed to appreciate that city officials were willing to listen and engage with residents.
Under Laesch’s administration, the city has also set up five public transition committees to gather community input on topics ranging from sustainability to public safety. Those committees are expected to publish reports, though Laesch said Tuesday he had no specific timeline on when that might be since it will be based on when the committees “are done with their work,” but he hopes they will be done by the end of the year.
Just after being elected but before he took office, Laesch formed a large, diverse transition team to help him prepare for his early days in office. Some of the members of that team ended up in key roles within his administration or filled spots left by those who resigned or retired around Laesch’s inauguration.
In addition to various open upper-level positions that he has filled during his early days in office, Laesch also created a new role: director of sustainability. The city under his leadership has been looking at restructuring various departments, including by potentially replacing the current Mayor’s Office of Economic Development with a new “Office of Sustainability, Development and Business Opportunity.”
“Sustainability” may be the word that ends up defining his entire administration, Laesch said at the interview Tuesday, not only because of his goals around climate and the environment but also because of what he is trying to do with the budget.
In addition to the budget and sustainability, Laesch has also been working on ways to “do housing differently” and on drafting an “ethics ordinance” to address concerns he has raised about campaign financing. During this year’s campaign and in the past, Laesch attacked former Mayor Irvin for taking campaign donations from those who do business with the city.
Laesch said that, in these first 100 days as mayor, he has prioritized what he said he was going to. Some things just take time, he said.
One thing Laesch has realized about the role, especially since he is “running short-handed” in the mayor’s office, he said, is that some things people may think happen automatically actually take a lot of “connecting the dots” to make sure they get done.
Plus, Laesch has been shocked by how “elevated” the office of mayor is in the city’s culture, he said. As an example, he described how at the end of his first meeting the whole room stood up when he did.
In an effort to push back against that mindset, instead of being known as “mayor this, mayor that,” Laesch said he’s having people just call him John.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
