Restaurant owner Jimmy Bergeron says he has put his campaign for a Naperville City Council seat on hiatus but that doesn’t mean he can’t wind up being elected considering he’ll still be on the ballot.
And, Bergeron says, if the voters elect him to the seat on April 7, he will serve.
Bergeron, who holds liquor licenses for The Wise Boxer Pour House and Jimmy’s Bar & Grill, announced late last month that he was suspending his candidacy, narrowing the field to 19 contenders for the eight seats being put to the voters in the spring.
At issue is a long-standing provision in the city code that forbids the granting of liquor licenses to state and local office holders. The ban was consistent with Illinois liquor law, until the state did away with the prohibition a decade ago, culminating a process that included input from Bergeron and other owners of restaurants that serve alcohol.
“Since the City of Naperville is a home rule community, the city would have had to go through its own process of updating the law — and unknown to me, they had not,” Bergeron said in a prepared statement. “So I was very surprised to find out in the 10 years since the law was changed statewide that the Naperville law had not been updated.”
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Calling the discrepancy “an oversight,” he put his campaign on hold while he tries to persuade city authorities to address it.
“We’re all scratching our heads and saying, ‘How did this get by us?'” said Bergeron, who plans to take up the issue with the Liquor Commission Thursday.
In the meantime, however, he’s not really out of the race.
“Mr. Bergeron has not submitted in writing his withdrawal from the election, so therefore his name will remain on the ballot,” said city spokeswoman Linda LaCloche in an email that confirmed Bergeron also remains subject to the same legal requirements as the other 18 candidates who continue their campaigns.
Even if the Liquor Commission takes up the discrepancy promptly and sends it along to the City Council for approval, a change to the liquor code needs proper opportunity to undergo review and comment from the community, Bergeron said, and should not be rushed to passage. It’s possible for an update to take effect before the election – and the council, four members of which are running for new terms, could further expedite the process by waiving the first reading and vote on the measure as soon as next week, if two-thirds of them voted to do so – but Bergeron said he doesn’t plan to press for that.
“You have to give the public a fair shake on giving their input, and I wouldn’t want it to happen any other way,” he said.
The public gives its input in various ways, however. One informal online poll shows Bergeron maintains significant support, coming out ahead of eight other candidates in January’s numbers. If his April 7 vote tally were to wind up among the top eight even in the absence of a campaign, he said he is willing to honor the will of the electorate.
“Legally and technically if I’m elected, I’m allowed to maintain my liquor license for that first year,” he said on Saturday. “Where the law gets tricky is when I go to renew my license in 2016. If in fact the law isn’t updated by then – and I can’t honestly see why it wouldn’t be updated by then – I would have to resign. I think you should be honest with the voters and let them know what’s going on, so that’s what I’m doing. If for some reason the voters support me knowing what’s going on and that my campaign has been suspended, well then, I guess the voters have spoken,”
Bergeron said that as a restaurant owner, he would actually hold less sway than he does now over matters affecting the bar-owning business community, because he would routinely recuse himself from votes that could impact that sector. But he emphasized that he does not want the process hurried.
One issue that won’t require his attention is campaign financing. He said he hasn’t held any fundraisers or accepted any monetary donations in support of his council run, so he won’t need to return or account for any funds.
However the matter is resolved, Bergeron said he’s not pointing fingers, saying that until the need arises to enforce a local law, it can be easy to overlook it – and the city’s legal team has an enormous volume of law on which to keep current.
“It’s nobody’s fault. None of this was done intentionally,” he said. “When something comes up, you fix it.”