An Aurora City Council committee is looking at tighter, more formal guidelines for aldermanic initiative funds, known commonly as ward funds.
The Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee on Tuesday saw a draft from the city’s Legal Department on an amendment to the city code that would formalize guidelines for spending the funds which are allocated to each City Council member each year.
The City Council has been guided by an unofficial policy of how to spend the funds since 2015 that was based on practice done since the funds were started in 1997.
Richard Veenstra, Aurora’s corporation counsel, said the draft ordinance amendment would, in essence, “codify what has generally been done for the last 25 years.”
Each alderman gets $75,000 a year to spend on things in their ward, with the at-large aldermen able to spend theirs across the city. Funds originally were seen as money for capital, “brick and mortar” projects, Veenstra said.
Over time, City Council members began also spending them on softer costs for quality of life programming, things like ward clean-ups, shredding events and such.
In 2009, aldermen agreed to do a one-third, two-thirds split, with $50,000 being spent on capital projects, and $25,000 on the softer project costs.
That was drafted into an unofficial policy in 2015 by the Office Committee, made up of the four most senior City Council members.
“It’s not an exact science,” Veenstra said. “The council has never adopted a policy formally on how aldermanic funds can be used.”
While the draft ordinance codifies what has been normal practice, it does provide for the Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee to have to sign off on what would be considered “out-of-the-box” non-capital expenditures.
The ordinance would create two pots of aldermanic fund money – capital funds, focused on infrastructure projects, which would be evenly split among all the ward aldermen, and non-capital funds, also evenly split among all the aldermen, with greater discretion but to serve a public purpose.
Initial reaction among aldermen on the Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee was that the tighter, more elucidated guideline was needed, but should be done with caution.
“I do believe this a very overdue guideline,” said Ald. Patty Smith, 8th Ward. “But we do need to be very careful about how controlling we get and how strict we are on this. The needs in each ward are very different.”
Veenstra pointed out that the diversity of the needs throughout the city was the very reason the ward funds were created in the first place.
Ald. Edward Bugg, 9th Ward, said he thought the one-third, two thirds concept “has worked for most of us.”
But he pointed out that he has spent ward funds on student scholarships in his ward, a situation brought about because many scholarship funds in Aurora cannot be given to residents of his ward because they live in Will County, outside of the service area of scholarship administrators such as The Dunham Foundation.
So, he created some scholarships students in his ward would be eligible for, he said.
“Each ward has its intricacies,” he said.
The Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee took the draft under advisement and will bring it back for more consideration at its next meeting in two weeks. Veenstra suggested the committee might have a recommendation for the full council by the second Rules, Administration and Procedures Committee meeting in November, but Smith said she is “not sure we can be that quick.”
Ald. Ron Woerman, at large, committee chair, said the committee will take it up again in two weeks.
