Incumbent Trustees Challenge Northbrook Caucus At Town Meeting

NORTHBROOK, IL — Although Election Day is Tuesday, a town hall meeting of the Northbrook Caucus this weekend could reshape the village board for years to come. A committee of the Caucus has recommended a clean slate of three new candidates for nomination as trustee, but the three snubbed incumbents plan to seek the votes of a larger audience.

Any Northbrook resident is eligible to vote at the Caucus' Town Meeting, which functions like a party political convention. Attendees will be slating candidates to stand in the April 2019 election for local school boards, the park board and library trustees, in addition to an anticipated competitive vote for nominees to the village board. The meeting will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at Wood Oaks Junior High School.

None of the three incumbent trustees whose terms expire next year – A.C. Buehler, Bob Israel, or Jim Karagianis – were recommended for slating by the Caucus' 10-member candidate selection sub-committee. That decision was endorsed by the Caucus' committee of the whole on Oct. 21.

"I think that the makeup of the Caucus wasn't representative of the views of the village as a whole," said Buehler, a tech consultant who is seeking a seventh four-year term on the board. He said the trio of candidates selected for slating by the Caucus committees don't have the same level of experience or knowledge of village affairs.

"Experience is critical at this time. The experience isn't just in age, but it's also in background and professions. The board would be highly slanted toward one profession," he said. "I don't think that gives a good blending of thought processes that's important to the management of the village for the next four years."

Karagianis, who will have been on the board 26 years at the end of his term, took issue with the Northbrook Caucus' process this year.

"This process has yielded a slate of three new people. Two of the three are attorneys," Karagianis said. "I have no quarrel with them whatsoever. I'm not saying they're bad people, but the resulting board will have five attorneys. The resulting board will have three brand new members and two sitting members halfway through their first term. So is that what you want for a village board when you're going to undergo the maximum amount of change in the village? That board would probably be the least experienced board in the history of Northbrook."

If the candidates recommended by the Caucus were elected, all but one Northbrook trustee would be a lawyer, and, as the incumbent trustees noted, they would all be under the age of 55. Village President Sandy Frum, elected in 2009 after 22 years as a trustee, would become the sole senior on the board. Buehler suggested that the Caucus slate would make for a historically inexperienced village board. Kathryn Ciesla would be the only village trustee with more than two years experience.

"I'm in my sixth term, and I'm still learning. And I was on the fire department as a paid-on-call firefighter for 15 years before I got on the board. I lived in the town all my life. I had seven years on the plan commission and even with all that I'm amazed at how much I learned in the first few years," Buehler said. "It's not a quick study."

The incumbent trustees urged members of the community to come out to the town hall meeting to better represent the population of the village as a whole.

"If people attend the Town Meeting, I think that'll be more representative of the people in the village that are interested, and we're hoping to have their support in getting back on the ballot." Bueller said the full meeting would give a better reflection of the opinion of Northbrook residents.

"I just want to encourage people to show up. I want this vote to represent the whole of Northbrook, as much of the opinion of Northbrook as we can get," said Israel, a civil engineer first elected in 2011. He said he hoped for an "educated and active participation" in the meeting. "I'm glad there's some competition. It's a good thing."

Six-term trustee Karagianis, a retired president of a manufacturing firm, said his next would be his final term as trustee if elected. He pointed to years of work on committees for downtown redevelopment and pointed to a number of developments that will be coming to a head over the next four years.

"It's kind of like a marathon runner being told not to cross the finish line in the last moments of the race," Karagianis. "I really was hoping to see I'd be slated one more time to see the maximum amount of change in Northbrook take place and to help that process along." Those projects include the proposed Northbrook Court redevelopment, negotiations over a possible relocation of the train station south to the former Grainger property recently purchased by the village and the potential sale and redevelopment of the downtown Meadow Shopping Plaza, among other projects.

"This next four years is going to determine the future of Northbrook," Karagianis said. "There's more happening in the next four years than there has been in the last 10 or 12." He pointed to his years of successfully negotiating with developers who sought benefits from the board, as well as two separate stints as chairman of the downtown redevelopment task force, as invaluable preparation for dealing with projects in the pipeline.

Caucus chair Amy Kurson said the candidate interview process was more thorough than in past years, with four meetings of the village trustee subcommittee.

"They interviewed eight candidates. They were very thoughtful about it," Kurson said. Four years ago half as many candidates presented themselves to the subcommittee. After the group made its picks, the trustee slating subcommittee was questioned by the other subcommittees about their selection. "They were an impressive group of volunteers and really articulate and I would say the rest of the committee of the whole really, really pressed those subcommittee members about their decision. It was interesting. I haven't seen that before."

Four years ago, the Caucus village trustee subcommittee did not recommend slating Buehler or Karagianis, Kurson recalled. But Buehler challenged the 2014 decision at the committee of the whole and was slated. Karagianis, who said he was first told he had been slated before being informed otherwise, went to the town meeting and successfully won his nomination from the floor. In 2010, all three men were slated, as the Caucus voted to slate Israel instead of incumbent realtor Kati Spaniak, who had been appointed by Frum to fill her seat after her election as village president.

This year, the candidates recommended for slating by the Caucus are Johannah "JoJo" Hebl, Ihab Riad and Heather Ross.

Hebl is an estate planning attorney and a gun safety advocate who served two years on the Stormwater Management Commission before being appointed to the Northbrook Plan Commission last year.

Riad is a program manager led IT development teams for top companies before leaving the corporate world to start his own real estate firm and construction company. Riad's firm built the first LEED energy efficient home in Northbrook, and he has served as treasurer for Go Green Northbrook and currently sits on the District 30 School Board of Education.

Ross is the co-founder of a reproductive technology law firm who recently completed a term as chair of the legal group within the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. She is also vice president of Congregation Hakafa in Glencoe and co-founder of the Jewish Coalition Against Sex Trafficking in Chicago.

A possible factor in the "clean slate" of candidate proposed by the Caucus committees: None of the three trustees not selected for slating supported adhering to Cook County's minimum wage ordinance last year, siding with the local business community who worried about a competitive disadvantage due to the village's location on the Lake County border and joining dozens of other municipalities in exempting local employers from the wage requirement. Following the vote, members of the Northbrook Working Families Coalition continued to attend board meetings dressed in distinctive red shirts to push for wage increases for workers in Northbrook making $8.25 an hour, who were unable to live in Northbrook but who work for and are employed by local businesses and residents.

The board reversed course this year on the issue of mandated paid sick leave, with only Buehler opposing it when trustees reconsidered the issue in September. But several members of the coalition participated in the Caucus' candidate selection process, and incumbent trustees suggested the minimum wage advocates may have played a role in the decision to select new candidates as a kind of payback for their vote in favor of the Chamber of Commerce and against workers' rights advocates. Other social issues, like increasing efforts to expand affordable housing and add local restrictions on firearms, could become more prominent under the fresh slate of candidates presented by the Caucus.

In past years, the Northbrook Village Board has been almost entirely white and less than a third female, reports Irv Leavitt in the Cook County Chronicle. The town is one of the most financially stable in the state, but recent decisions, ranging from the sick leave reversal, to the approval of a sober living facility in a residential neighborhood and the declaration that the county's ban on assault-style weapons would be enforced in the village, shows change in Northbrook seems to "come slowly, then all at once," Leavitt writes.

Karagianis said he had no problem with pursuing a social agenda, but suggested local government is not the place to legislate state and national policy matters.

"Being a village trustee is more about the nuts and bolts of running a village. Do your streets get swept? Do you streets get plowed? Do your streets get rebuilt? Does your water system work properly? Are the water mains being replaced on a regular basis? Is your police department up to snuff? Is your fire department up to snuff, in terms of response time? Is your development going the way you want it to?" Karagianis said. "Those are the questions that a village trustee deals with on a day-to-day basis."

The incumbent trustees said the screening questions asked by the candidate slating subcommittee this year were less specific and less focused on village policy matters than in past years. Since the all-volunteer Caucus has different members on its subcommittees each election, the criteria for candidates can change as well. Among the questions asked of those seeking the Caucus' endorsement for trustee at the subcommittee level this year:

• "[T]here are and will be referenda on the ballot put to Northbrook voters. How would you consider your responsibility as a public servant with respect to the results of these referenda?" (Presumably this refers to non-binding advisory referendums.)
• "An important responsibility of the Village government is balancing the many – sometimes competing – interests of local businesses, public agencies, advocacy groups, and even Northbrook residents, while also taking into consideration social responsibility and the good of the Village. How would you think about your role as Village Trustee in the context of this dynamic?"
• "Diversity and inclusion continue to be close-held values of Northbrook residents. How should the Village consider and act on these values in the context of a changing community?"

According to the Caucus website: "The subcommittee also looked at gaps on the currently seated Village Board. We took into consideration a helpful list of Village priorities provided by the Village Manager. We also took into consideration a matrix of Village Board professional, civic, and governmental experiences. The subcommittee then voted on their top three candidates to recommend to the Committee of the Whole." Two incumbents challenged the subcommittee's endorsement at the committee of the whole meeting but were rejected unanimously by the 35 members across all nominating subcommittees.

The town hall meeting is also due to consider a revision to its bylaws. The updates to the agreement, which has not amended in more than 35 years, will be presented in omnibus form and requires a 60 percent vote to adopt.

"Some of the bylaws are really outdated. They haven't been updated since 1982," said Kurson. "The caucus process and the level of volunteerism is different than it was in 1982." She said the changes amounted to a "comprehensive redraft" that would make the bylaws easier to amend in the future.

Some of the changes: changing rules for nominating candidates from the floor, changing quorum requirements and changing the Caucus' definition of diversity from representing east and west Northbrook to representing census-designated groups. A proposal to cap the number of times the Caucus can nominate the same person for the same office was removed due to insufficient support, according to its chair.

One of the proposed changes to the Caucus bylaws would appear to make it significantly more difficult to challenge the nominating subcommittee. Taking effect in 2020 if approved, the change would raise the threshold for candidates not selected by the Caucus' committee.

"Caucus Committee Nominated Candidates who have not been nominated by a Sub-Committee may be approved by a simple majority of votes cast, regardless whether the votes in favor constitute a majority of a quorum. New Candidates who have not been nominated must be ratified by a ¾ of the attendees of the Town Meeting," under the proposed new bylaws.

The current language of the bylaws says the Caucus "is entrusted with the responsibility of providing reasonable opportunity for discussion and debate, and of receiving with equanimity all nominations and suggestions from the floor. All such nominations from the floor must be accompanied by assurance that the proposed nominee will accept the nomination if approved by the Caucus Town Meeting."

While none of the incumbent candidates were ready to talk about their plans if they were unsuccessful in being slated from the floor, Sunday's town hall may be their last chance. State law suggests candidates who lose a bid for a party's nomination do not get a second bite at the apple as an independent.

"A candidate seeking election to an office for which candidates of political parties are nominated by caucus who is a participant in the caucus and who is defeated for his or her nomination at such caucus, is ineligible to be listed on the ballot at that general or consolidated election as an independent candidate."

To a secure the nomination from the full Caucus Sunday, candidates must earn more than 50 percent of the ballots cast. Multiple rounds of voting by secret ballot may be held until three candidates achieve that threshold.

Nov. 4 Update: Johannah "JoJo" Hebl, Bob Israel and Heather Ross were slated in the first round of voting. The proposed changes to the bylaws were rejected "overwhelmingly" in a "fair and orderly" meeting attended by about 500 people, according to Kurson.