After Aurora Mayor John Laesch seemingly made his pick to lead the city’s fire department, then pulled back on his decision, he now says there is no big rush to move forward.
The Aurora City Council was set to consider Laesch’s appointment of Mark Bozik, the village of Roselle’s former fire chief, as the next chief of the Aurora Fire Department during a meeting on April 14.
But the item was pulled from the agenda less than 12 hours before the meeting, and so aldermen did not discuss or vote on it — although Aurora firefighters, department leadership and retired leaders still showed up in force to the council chambers.
“The decision to hire a fire chief from outside of this department, from the ranks of the Aurora Fire Department, is a wrong decision,” said former Aurora Fire Chief Gary Krienitz during the meeting’s public comment period. “It’s going to hurt the city of Aurora, it’s going to hurt the residents, it’s going to hurt the guests and it’s going to hurt the firefighters.”
David McCabe, who succeeded Krienitz as fire chief, sent a letter to City Council members on the morning of April 14 expressing “frustration and disappointment” over Laesch’s pick for the role. He urged aldermen to vote against the appointment, to direct the mayor’s office to look at internal candidates again and to make them prove an outside candidate was needed.
He made it clear in the letter that, although he was critical of Laesch’s pick, his criticisms were directed at the mayor’s office and were not intended to be a reflection of Bozik as a candidate.
Laesch told The Beacon-News in an interview the following week that he made the decision to delay the appointment after aldermen expressed concerns about his pick.
When asked if he was still planning to move forward with the same candidate, Laesch said he didn’t have a plan and wasn’t in a hurry to make a decision. Laesch is taking the time to “recalibrate,” he said, meaning that he is seeing “where we’re at politically.”
He had spoken with Bozik and let him know that the city was leaving the decision “in limbo,” he said.
“We’ve had an interim there for a couple of months now,” Laesch said. “And, it’s important that I go through a thorough vetting process.”
McCabe retired in late November after nearly three-and-a-half years as fire chief and 28 years at the Aurora Fire Department in total. Since McCabe’s retirement, Deputy Chief Kevin Nickel has served in the position as interim fire chief.
It isn’t fair that Nickel has needed to do the job of both fire chief and deputy fire chief for this long, McCabe said. There’s a lot the chief does and a lot the deputy chief does, he said, and plus there are some conflicts between each roles’ duties.
For example, a deputy chief is in charge of internal investigations, according to McCabe. He said that person interviews whoever the person being investigated is, along with witnesses, and then reports the facts of the case to the fire chief, who can make a decision without any of the emotions involved or other comments made throughout the process.
“You got one person trying do both, and it’s just not feasible as a long-term solution,” he said.
When asked how much longer the setup could be feasible, McCabe said he doesn’t believe it should have even taken this long. Part of it may be that he didn’t give a long notice for his own retirement, he said, but that is in part because he took a voluntary buyout that the city rolled out to help with budget concerns.
Laesch said he chose Bozik because he was the most well-rounded candidate and had the strongest resume across the board, but he refused to get into specifics about other candidates’ qualifications. There was a thorough process, he said, and many internal and external candidates were considered.
Plus, Laesch “firmly believes” the Aurora Fire Department would benefit from a “fresh, outside perspective,” he said.
Aurora has hired outside candidates to lead city departments, both under his administration and before it, with positive results, according to Laesch.
But McCabe, in his letter to the aldermen, said it would be the first time in the department’s 170-year history that an outside candidate was hired to be the city’s fire chief.
He later told The Beacon-News that it takes a while to learn about Aurora since it is unique — it is very large and very diverse, with a variety of economic backgrounds — but an internal candidate had to climb the ranks, and so has the experience.
Plus, there’s a lot of projects going on at the Aurora Fire Department right now, between new alerting systems, new fire stations, new computers in vehicles and more, according to McCabe. The team already there works well together, he said, but an outsider may come in and stop years of work.
As for the quality of internal candidates, McCabe said the department has worked hard on succession planning to make sure those in lower positions were trained to take the step up.
“These people have really put in their dues. They worked hard to be in a position where they deserve to be promoted,” he said. “And it’s not just the chief position.”
If the chief isn’t promoted from inside, it stops everyone else from moving up the ladder, according to McCabe. He said that, if everyone is promoted in a line, it is potentially seven promotions that are stopped with an external hire.
Along those same lines, Krienitz said during the April 14 meeting that hiring an external fire chief would create a leadership vacuum at the Aurora Fire Department. People will no longer see their future at this city’s fire department, he said, and upper leaders will leave.
If a fire department was stagnant and simply reactive, with firefighters just showing up to work and going on calls, or if there were big scandals, then McCabe could see the need to “inject some new energy, some new blood into this system” — but he said that’s not what Aurora Fire Department is like.
However, when Laesch was asked if he had any broad concerns with the fire department, he took a long pause. Eventually, he said that they were “doing a good job responding to calls as they come in” and, after an ask for clarification, that they were “doing a good job maintaining the status quo.”
When asked if he would like to see them do something other than maintain the status quo, Laesch said that there’s “some added perspective that would come from an outside candidate that would benefit the department.”
“I mean, that’s just the reality of it. I’m not going to get into the details,” he said.
If there were allegations against the department, Laesch questioned how he would evaluate them from the mayor’s office. It would need to be someone who has experience evaluating it from a fire perspective, he said.
In his letter to aldermen, McCabe said that it is “not a secret the mayor has had it out for the fire department since he entered office.” When reached for comment at the time, Laesch said he couldn’t comment on the letter because he hadn’t read it — and during his more recent interview, he said he still hadn’t read it.
When flags were ordered lowered by President Donald Trump and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year, Laesch told city leadership to raise them instead. However, all of the city’s fire stations seemingly disobeyed the mayor by lowering their flags.
McCabe told The Beacon-News that the situation created a rift between the mayor and the city’s firefighters. McCabe put himself in between the two, he said, and personally raised nearly all the flags himself, except a couple that were raised by an assistant chief.
“I know there was still some animosity between the firefighters and the mayor after that,” he said.
But McCabe hopes that doesn’t continue. There needs to be buy-in from both sides, he said, but “the ball’s in the mayor’s court.”
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
