Jim Capparelli Has Brought Stability To Joliet: O'Dekirk

JOLIET, IL — After attaining only 29 percent of the vote in Tuesday's election, Joliet's defeated two-term Mayor Bob O'Dekirk said he plans to devote his attention to his downtown Joliet law firm that employs seven lawyers. After the loss, O'Dekirk said he called newly elected Mayor Terry D'Arcy to wish him the best of luck moving the city forward.

"I offered to help with any transition," O'Dekirk said. "I'm looking forward to running my law firm, at least for a while. I have two excellent partners."

D'Arcy attained 62 percent of the vote, while the third candidate, Tycee Bell, received 9 percent of the vote.

"I want to thank the citizens for trusting in me the last 12 years, four years on the City Council and the last eight years as mayor," O'Dekirk told Joliet Patch on Wednesday. "I'm very proud of what we accomplished in the last eight years, and I would have liked to have seen things through. Obviously, the voters went in a different direction.

"The city is doing very well right now, and I hope Mayor D'Arcy and the new Council will continue with that success. Being mayor was a great honor."

O'Dekirk said he's proud of many accomplishments during his eight years as mayor including the Tony's Fresh Market that opened at the vacant Kmart store at Jefferson and Larkin. The biggest success, he said, was Joliet's 100-year agreement with the city of Chicago to obtain Lake Michigan water to supply the citizens of Joliet with clean drinking water.

"I think with the water project, Joliet is going to benefit big time from that decision," O'Dekirk remarked. "The Council decided to take a deep dive into this, and that whole project is a legacy project."

O'Dekirk said the January 2021 hiring of Castle Law private practice attorney Jim Capparelli as the new city manager was a good move for Joliet.

Capparelli became Joliet's first permanent city manager since David Hales was let go in October 2018, with a severance payout of about $89,000.

As it stands, Capparelli's future with Joliet remains cloudy. His city manager's contract expires on July 12.

Three people who voted for hiring Capparelli — O'Dekirk, Councilwoman Bettye Gavin and Councilman Terry Morris — won't be in office next month when D'Arcy takes over as mayor.

In their place will be: Suzanna Ibarra, who defeated Morris on Tuesday night, according to unofficial vote totals. Cesar Cardenas, owner of downtown Joliet's Unidos Marketing Network, and one of D'Arcy's biggest advocates, will be part of the new City Council.

In addition, two Council members who did not want Capparelli as city manager to begin with, Sherri Reardon and Pat Mudron, both won re-election Tuesday night.

"Capparelli has done a good job bringing stability to the city," O'Dekirk told Joliet Patch on Wednesday. "As you know, we were in a free fall for two years, and now we've had over two years of stability."

Regarding Capparelli's future, O'Dekirk was not sure what direction the new Council would go in terms of city manager.

O'Dekirk said that whatever decision the Council makes, he does not want to see another Marty Shanahan situation play out inside City Hall.

In the summer of 2019, right after Reardon won election, she became an instrument of change and controversy.

After keeping silent about her intentions during her spring campaign against Joe Mutz, Reardon voted to get rid of Shanahan as Joliet's interim city manager within weeks of taking office.

A year later, in 2020, the Council voted to give Shanahan and his lawyer a $200,000 payout to settle Shanahan's wrongful termination lawsuit against Joliet and his replacement, Steve Jones.

"When they fired (Shanahan), they didn't know what to do," O'Dekirk said of the old Mudron 5 — Mudron, Reardon, Gavin, Mike Turk and Don "Duck" Dickinson.

After ousting Shanahan during the summer of 2019, Mudron said he made some phone calls to Michigan in hopes of convincing previous city manager Jim Hock to come out of retirement.

When that did not work out at first, the Mudron 5 tapped city economic development director Steve Jones to become interim city manager.

Jones stayed in that job until leaving Joliet in August 2020. During that time frame, the Council conducted a national hiring search for a new city manager that ended with Will Jones of Mequon, Wisconsin and J. Mark Rooney of Rhode Island, former village manager of Wheeling and Carpentersville, as their two finalists.

Then, Reardon called for spending several thousand dollars of city funds to make the two out of state finalists undergo personality tests.

In the end, Joliet did not offer either Will Jones or Rooney the job, and instead the city lured Michigan native Jim Hock out of retirement to serve as interim city manager until early 2021.

In January 2021, Capparelli took over as permanent city manager, and he's been in the job ever since.

Related Joliet Patch coverage:

Steve Jones Believes Mayor Had Different Ideas, Motivations

Mudron 5: Personality Tests For 2 City Manager Finalists

Will Jones: Joliet's Next City Manager?