The behind-the-scenes political jockeying that began after the death of Waukegan Mayor Dan Drew last week played out in public Wednesday night during a special City Council meeting as veteran Ald. Richard Hyde was unanimously elected acting mayor.
Hyde, a retired Waukegan High School athletic director who has been on the City Council since 1987, had the backing of Democratic Party officials who were determined that Drew’s successor would be a Democrat like the late mayor.
Hyde, 74, pledged to continue working on Drew’s agenda to revitalize the city. “I’m not going to be a lame-duck mayor,” he said. “We’ll follow Dan’s wishes to the letter.”
Republican officials had hoped to build bipartisan support for Ald. Patrick Needham, a fifth-generation Waukegan resident and businessman elected to the council three years ago.
Republicans needed Democratic support because there are five Democrats on the eight-member City Council and only five votes were needed to install a temporary mayor.
“Patrick in many ways is similar to Dan, except he’s a younger version and a Republican version,” said Antonietta “Ant” Simonian, executive director of the Lake County Republican Federation.
Hyde will be mayor until a special election is held next year to coincide with the council’s regularly scheduled municipal elections.
Drew, the city’s treasurer for eight years and the finance administrator of its Park District for 16 before he was elected mayor, had been in office for eight months when he died Jan. 30 after an apparent heart attack at his home. He was 53.
Council members said Hyde should try to carry out Drew’s agenda.
Drew had been working with the City Council to attempt to turn around Waukegan’s sagging downtown and convert its 1,500 acres of Lake Michigan shoreline into a mixed-use development and recreational area for Waukegan’s nearly 90,000 residents.
Plans are in the works for a $16 million renovation of the Genesee Theatre, a 1927 movie palace, construction of a new City Hall and the start of a specially commissioned study on how the former Rust Belt city can reinvent itself.
But Drew’s vision went beyond bricks and mortar. One of his first acts as mayor was to appoint J.A. “Tony” Figueroa, a Democrat who worked as an engineer at Abbott Laboratories, as an alderman. At the time of Figueroa’s appointment, no Hispanics sat on the City Council, even though Hispanics make up roughly 45 percent of the city’s population.
Drew, who won election to the mayor’s post by six votes over an independent candidate backed by several prominent Republicans, also appointed a Republican alderman, Ray Vukovich, to be his chief of staff.
Waukegan’s last Republican mayor was Haig Paravonian, who held the job from 1989 to 1993.
