Editor’s Note: This is one in a series of stories looking at contested races in the April 1 general election.
Aurora voters are set to soon choose between four candidates for the Aurora City Council’s 1st Ward aldermanic seat.
This and other local races — including for Aurora’s mayor, one of two alderman at-large seats and several other ward aldermen — are set to be decided in the April 1 consolidated election. Early voting is now open in all four of Aurora’s counties.
Whoever is voted in as the 1st Ward alderman of the Aurora City Council will serve only until 2027, half of a typical four-year term, because the previously elected 1st Ward alderman, Emmanuel Llamas, resigned last year.
Incumbent Dan Barreiro, a now-retired longtime city employee, was chosen by Mayor Richard Irvin and approved by the Aurora City Council to take Llamas’ place last August.
He is now running for the seat alongside Hugo Saltijeral, the executive director of Valley Sheltered Workshop in Batavia; Bishop Jeffrey D. Donelson, the pastor at Everlasting Word Church in Aurora; and Ray Hull, who is also a retired longtime city employee.
All four candidates agreed to interviews with The Beacon-News earlier this month.
Dan Barreiro
Barreiro started working at the city of Aurora as an intern, but throughout his 35 years held a number of different positions, eventually reaching the position of Chief Community Services Officer before retiring.
Before being appointed to the 1st Ward alderman position last year, Barreiro served for around 11 years on the East Aurora School Board, helping in that role and others to guide the school district he graduated from.
While he had never before considered becoming an alderman, people encouraged him to apply, he said, and after thinking hard, decided it would be a good opportunity to help both the school district and the city as a whole, since he has been a resident of the 1st Ward since 1979.
Now, Barreiro is running for alderman again because he feels eight months in the position was not enough time to get anything done, and he’d like to see how much he can accomplish with two more years, he said.
If he is elected to return to the City Council, in the short-term, Barreiro said he would work to re-establish a ward committee that would guide the use of ward funds, which because of buildup over previous budget years is now over $700,000.
Barreiro is also looking to get more 1st Ward residents involved in city boards and commissions so that the ward has more representation, since those boards and commissions are where a lot of decisions are made, he said.
On a daily basis, Barreiro said he would be focused on quality-of-life issues impacting ward residents.
He keeps track of all the issues people bring to him or that he hears at community meetings, and he looks for opportunities to address them long-term, he said. Plus, Barreiro said that when he has heard about bigger concerns, he has reached out to state representatives to try and get them addressed.
Long-term, Barreiro wants to be more proactive about getting businesses to take advantage of a ward program that splits the cost of facade work, up to $5,000, he said. He would like to focus on the ward’s primary gateways so they look more inviting.
He is also looking to roll out other programs if elected, such as a program to fill funding gaps for home improvement projects for seniors or people with special needs and a neighborhood improvement grant program for organizations.
As for his priorities on City Council, Barreiro said he would be pushing more affordable housing, continuing to develop downtown, “cleaning up” the corridor that includes RiverEdge Park and the Metra station, traffic throughout the city and quality-of-life issues.
His 35 years working for the city in various roles, from human resources to finance and community services, is something that sets Barreiro apart from his opponents in this race, since he understands different aspects of city government and worked with various community organizations, he said.
Plus, he helped to create the city’s current budget process, which is much more informative than the previous process, Barreiro said.
And, since he is retired, he said he can devote more of his time to being an alderman.
Hugo Saltijeral
Saltijeral’s involvement in nonprofits first started with volunteering when he felt “a desire to live differently,” he said.
After volunteering a while, he quit his career in sales to take a job at Hesed House in Aurora, where he worked for nine years and became an associate director.
While there, he worked to identify root causes of people’s homelessness, which started “emptying out” the shelter, Saltijeral said. He helped people get into rehab, partnered with businesses to give people temporary jobs and build relationships between the police and people, he said.
Plus, he taught people that homelessness is an emergency and worked to change their mindset about the situation they were in, he said.
Saltijeral has now worked for three years as the executive director of Valley Sheltered Workshop, or VSW, which offers adults with disabilities low-intensity jobs and a safe community space.
After trying to run for City Council in 2017 but getting kicked off the ballot, which he said was because he didn’t staple his petitions together, Saltijeral said he was left with a bad taste in his mouth. Part of him is running now to cut back on those kinds of restrictions, he said.
While others may change when they get into politics, Saltijeral said he has served on community boards and has always been the “same guy that joined it.”
He is also running because he feels like there are more people he is meant to help, Saltijeral said. His job in life, he said, is to educate people and show them that they have the power within themselves to make change.
If elected, Saltijeral said a top priority of his would be to create a ward coalition that isn’t run by the city. With his background in community organizing, Saltijeral would work to bring together neighborhood groups into an active community organization.
He would also try to stop the city from working against the schools, such as making it easy for for-profit programs to take children away from schools’ extracurricular activities, he said, because the school should be at the center of a child’s community.
If tax increment financing districts, or TIFs, are used incorrectly, they can also hurt schools, he said. TIF districts were designed to give an area an economic boost, he said, not to be a livelihood.
“If our city can afford to shell out money, it should be putting it in the pockets of Aurorans, not dipping into the pockets of the Aurorans to give it to someone else,” Saltijeral said.
Plus, if businesses are brought in, they should be places that Aurora families can go to, he said.
What sets Saltijeral apart from others in this race, he said, is that his family has lived in Aurora for generations — and has not just been taking from the community, but has been building it up since arriving.
If elected, Saltijeral said he wants to serve all ward residents, whether they just arrived or have been here for generations, and make them feel comfortable so they aren’t worried about what is happening in City Hall.
Jeffrey D. Donelson
Donelson, whose family has been here for seven generations, has been a pastor for decades, first in street ministry and now as pastor of Everlasting Word Church in Aurora.
He was first spurred into local politics, he said, when his nephew was killed in 2000 during the violence of that time.
The city had multiple murders each year, but Donelson said he felt like no one cared because the violence was in the minority community. When people finally did become concerned, it was after Jeffrey Signorelli was killed on the West Side, he said.
So, he ran twice for alderman at-large, once in 2002 and again in 2006, but lost both times.
Although Donelson said Barreiro is doing a better job than past 1st Ward aldermen, the person holding that position has always been somewhat absent and hasn’t been part of the community, he said.
If elected, Donelson’s goal would be to have ward picnics and block parties, like there were in the 1960s and 1970s, he said. Donelson also suggested creating ward walks with historical facts to get people out, since people are not making the effort to get to know each other, he said.
Parking is one of the issues Donelson said he would focus on as alderman. Many children had to move back home, so with multiple adults in a single house, there are more cars, and some streets are blocked, he said.
Off-site parking lots could help to fix the problem like they have in other communities, Donelson said.
Another thing Donelson said he would focus on if elected is doing something with the open spaces in the ward. For example, he said solar farms could be built to bring income to the city and lower electric rates.
With the new Hollywood Casino location under construction, Donelson would need to be proactive in planning for the effect that will have on the ward by looking at historical context but still planning for the future, he said.
Donelson said he generally likes the direction the city is heading under Mayor Richard Irvin and what he has done to revitalize the city, but also that there needs to be more affordable housing.
He suggested creating for young adults more tiny apartments, around 400 square feet, in empty factories around the city. They could even be dorm-style with communal bathrooms and limited kitchens, he said.
The city should also look at updating some of its outdated ordinances, he said.
As a pastor, Donelson has dealt with people from their highest highs to their lowest lows, so he understands what people are going through, he said. Plus, since he has been on a number of different community organizations’ boards, he said he has gotten to meet people from all walks of life.
It is his proactive leadership that sets him apart from others in this race who are more reactive and just wait for things to happen, Donelson said. In the military and after, he has been a leader all his life, he said.
Ray Hull
Hull has lived in Aurora for nearly 50 years, is a West Aurora High School graduate and spent 36 years working at the city of Aurora’s Water and Sewer Maintenance Division.
Since retiring from the city in 2015, Hull has started a small business — a transportation service — with his wife. Hull has also been involved with community organizations, which started during his first of two terms on the East Aurora School Board.
After running for alderman at-large in 2021, an election he said he lost despite winning the most votes in the 1st Ward, he is now running just for the alderman of his ward on a platform of being the “voice of reason to say that we will have to slow down some of the things that are taking place.”
After watching the city’s current administration for the past few years, he has noticed that there is a lack of checks and balances from the City Council and that there has been “unabated spending levels,” he said.
The City Council needs to be a check and balance, Hull said, so that no mayor has complete control over city government.
The issues with the city’s budget primarily come from the city’s high payroll and the projects that continue to require the city to sell bonds, according to Hull. He said that, under the current administration, a large number of new positions have been created and top-level positions have seen significant jumps in pay.
“If half of those employees were removed, the city would still function at the same level,” Hull said.
As for the projects, Hull said he understands the city needs commercial growth, and doesn’t want to stop that growth, but does think it needs to slow down. Aldermen need to start asking hard questions about what they are being presented and should not be approving things without knowing what they will cost, he said.
Another thing Hull said he would be focused on if elected is the revitalization of neighborhoods. Because he came from the service division in the city, he knows how to get residents’ problems fixed when they reach out to him because he knows which departments to go to and which people to connect to, he said.
An alderperson should be both someone who can solve individual problems and someone who can be a check and balance for the budget process, Hull said. Plus, he is hands-on with problems and is used to being on-call 24 hours a day because of his time in the city’s Water and Sewer Maintenance Division, he said.
What sets Hull apart from his opponents, he said, is that he has proven leadership experience across his time as union president of the city public works employees’ union and nine years as superintendent of the Water and Sewer Maintenance Division.
Plus, he has operational experience from his time working at the city and governing experience from his time on the East Aurora School Board, he said.
While his opponent Barreiro also has leadership experience from working at the city, Hull said he was more forward-facing and hands-on.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
