Niles Mayor Andrew Przybylo and the village’s board of trustees crowded around retired village attorney Joe Annunzio for a picture at their July meeting after bestowing the long-time employee with a plaque celebrating his nearly 20 years of service to the community.
Annunzio retired in mid-June after 18 years as the village’s in-house counsel. He was called a “a good friend and a food friend to the village” by Przybylo.
Soon after Annunzio announced his retirement, the village hired Dusanka Grcic as a part-time attorney for the village. Grcic will be paid $85,000 annually, according to Mitch Johnson, communications coordinator for the village. Annunzio received roughly $139,000 in his last year of full-time legal service to Niles.
The 67-year-old Park Ridge resident was first hired by the village in 1996 to aid in the removal an underground storage tank per the state’s environmental guidelines from the site of a former gas station that Niles had purchased.
“It was on the corner of Oakton and Waukegan where the present-day administration building is and where I wound up working for 19 years,” he said.
Annunzio was, at the time, an environmental attorney with a private practice in Chicago.
After the job was completed, he was hired on a part-time basis by former Niles Mayor Nicholas Blase. He became the village’s full-time in-house legal counsel in 1998. Annunzio said Przybylo is the third mayor he’s worked for in Niles following Bob Callero and Blase, who served nearly a year in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2006 to an insurance kickback scheme.
Annunzio said he didn’t expect to practice municipal law, but the opportunity Niles provided was a hard one to pass up. As an environmental attorney in the 1990s, he was struggling to compete for business with large-scale firms.
While working for Niles, “I began to take on more responsibilities and over time I became a municipal attorney, and a decent one at that,” he said.
Annunzio began his career as a Chicago Public Schools teacher and a musician. He received a master’s degree in music composition from Roosevelt University, he said, and his last job in CPS was teaching band at Hirsch Metropolitan High School on Chicago’s South Side.
“The music business is a tough business. Thats one reason why I began to look at law school,” he said.
Annunzio left CPS in 1980 and graduated from the John Marshall Law School in Chicago in 1985. He spent his four years in law school washing windows in the morning, studying in the afternoon and taking classes at night, he said.
After receiving his law degree, Annunzio spent nine and a half years working for the Illinois Attorney General’s Office in its environmental division before opening up his private law practice. Annunzio has also taught environmental and administrative law at his alma mater since 1994.
As a municipal attorney, Annunzio touts saving the village money and shielding the municipality from major legal headaches as his biggest accomplishments.
“Many times I would pick something up and run with it and take care of it long before it would get to litigation,” said Annunzio, who is also a past president of the Illinois Local Government Lawyers Association.
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Przybylo noted at the village board’s July meeting that the former Niles attorney is still aiding Niles through his work on the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission. Annunzio has served on the commission since 2000 and was elected vice-chairman of the organization last year.
He said he’s currently chairing a committee tasked with working on a method to redistribute take-off and landing routes at O’Hare International Airport. The goal, he said, is for all communities to receive a fair share of air traffic noise rather than having it concentrated in a few suburbs.
He said his work on the commission has provided an outlet for his interest in environmental law.
“You get involved in things like environmental law because you are passionate about it. It’s like music. It’s the same thing. You do it because of things that go beyond money,” he said.
Aside from continuing his work on the commission, Annunzio said he’s not sure what he’ll do as a retiree. Taking on part-time legal work or even joining a band are not out of the question, he said.
He said he looks back on his time in Niles fondly, and appreciates that it was a job that allowed him time to spend with his wife and three children – something he said wouldn’t have been so easy had he instead opted to join a big law firm.
“By and large it was interesting work,” he said of the job in Niles. “Every day was something new.”
Lee Gaines is a freelancer.