Mayor-Elect Eager To Get Joliet Moving Forward

Caption: Mayor-elect Bob O’Dekirk and wife, Rebecca.

When Mayor-elect Bob O’Dekirk glances around Joliet, he sees the city’s untapped potential.

Once an economic powerhouse in Will County, the 1980s collapse of steel and manufacturing during threw Joliet into an economic tailspin.

As a young Joliet police officer, O’Dekirk was hired with “riverboat” money in the early 1990s, when casino jobs and revenue gave a much-needed boost to the local economy.

Gains the city made through careful long-term planning and aggressive development of a diversified local economy not reliant on manufacturing took a hit in 2007 with the onslaught of the Great Recession.

While neighboring communities have seemed to recover and prosper since the economic turnaround, O’Dekirk, in his own words, says that Joliet is still stuck in economic “neutral” almost ten years later.

O’Dekirk told one local paper that after ten years on the street as a cop and four years on the city council, he got to see how the city government runs from two very different perspectives.

How does he see his role as mayor of Illinois’s fourth largest city when he is sworn in on May 4?

“I see the mayor’s job being the face of the city while the city manager takes care of day-to-day operations,” he said. “I imagine travel will be involved to sell Joliet. The mayor does make a number of appointments. I’m also putting together a transition team. I’ve had a positive conversation with the city manager [James Hock].”

Cop on the Hill

The cop-turned-attorney comes from a long line of tough Canaryville Irish from Chicago’s South Side. Growing up in Oak Forest, O’Dekirk boxed and played football and baseball. He also played the drums.

“When I was a kid my parents hated the drums and thought it was a waste of time,” he laughed. “I don’t play baseball or football or box anymore, but I still play the drums.”

He moved to Joliet in 1993 when he was hired as a Joliet police officer, one of many hired with “riverboat” revenue from Harrah’s Casino.

“Joliet was like the wild, wild west for a young cop,” O’Dekirk said. “It was a lot of fun but there times we were a little bit overwhelmed.”

He spent ten years working on “the Hill.” O’Dekirk recalls the friction between the older officers on the police force with the new officers, partly because the younger cops were college educated and trained to take a more sociological approach to the crime problems that plagued Joliet in the 1990s.

“The old timers didn’t want to be social workers, but we pushed and implemented it,” he said. “Over time we had a pretty good relationship between minority community leaders and police.”

Working with the city council, the Joliet Police Department put dedicated police officers in schools and neighborhoods, which O’Dekirk credits with reducing the city’s then gang problem to “almost nothing.”

“When I first came out here as a young police officer the gangs and violence were really bad,” he said. “By the end of the 1990s and 2000s things got significantly better.”

With a dozen or so murders since Thanksgiving due mostly to gun violence, O’Dekirk wants to bring back those programs that helped drive the gangs back.

“We went down 60 police officers and we’re in the process of rebuilding that,” O’Dekirk said. “We cut out the crucial things police were doing in the 1990s and early 2000s and it’s made Joliet turn the wrong way. We’re reaping it now.”

Despite the current spike in the city’s murder rate, the mayor-elect says Joliet isn’t nearly as bad as it was when he was a cop on the streets more than 20 years ago.

A More Open Government

Something he’d like to pursue as mayor right off is hiring an economic development director to come up with a long-term plan for Joliet ten, twenty years into the future.

He’d also like to see the city hire a professional lobbyist to help Joliet procure more grants “because a lot of state and federal money is being left on the table.”

When rumors started to swirl months before Caterpillar announced in March that it would be pulling out of the Joliet area, O’Dekirk says that the city council challenged the city manager and current mayor to go talk to company representatives and find out what they needed to make them stay.

“I’ve been told subsequently that very little could have been done,” O’Dekirk said. “What I would have done is reach out to our state legislators to see if anything could have been done at the state level in way of tax breaks and incentives. I don’t know if that was done at all.”

O’Dekirk also wants to change how the mayor communicates with council members in an effort to end the infighting on the city council. He points out Mayor Tom Giarrante’s negotiations with a private prison firm to build a federal immigrant detention center in Joliet as an example of the current mayor “keeping city council members in the dark.”

“After Peotone rejected the prison, our city manager came forward and wanted to bring it to Joliet,” O’Dekirk says. “It became a real issue and something we discussed at every city council meeting. The mayor had met with representatives from Tennessee, but every time it was brought forward there was no plan in place. From my perspective, as mayor, I would not want to make those same mistakes.”

Still A Joliet Guy

O’Dekirk retired from the Joliet Police Department in 2003 after he earned his law degree from John Marshall Law School. He is a partner in a downtown Joliet law firm Carlson, Zelazo and O’Dekirk.

Some Joliet residents have questioned how O’Dekirk will be able to balance his demanding law practice with his mayoral duties.

“Fortnately I have several partners and lawyers who work with me,” he said. “They’ll keep the business up and running so I’ll be selective in the cases I take.”

Living in the Catheral neighborhood with his wife, Rebecca, and their three children, O’Dekirk considers himself a “Joliet guy.”

“I like to work out at Inwood park district gym,” O’Dekirk says. “I I still play drums with a group of cops and I play with some other local guys who asked me to sit in.”

Another question he gets asked often these days is if Bob O’dekirk is related to Bob Odenkirk, star of “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad.”

“As far as I know there is no relationship. It’s a little coincidental, him being from Naperville,” O’Dekirk said. “A guy just asked me that today. The O’Dekirks were from Canaryville.”

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