Two long-time employees at Aurora City Hall have decided to leave early in 2017.
Brian Caputo, city finance director, will leave sometime in March after almost 19 years at Aurora to take a job at College of DuPage. Rosario DeLeon, director of public properties, will retire in February after 31 years, working mostly at the city’s Central Garage.
“Both of them have been great employees of the city of Aurora,” said Mayor Robert O’Connor. “I worked with both of them from the alderman’s side for years, and now briefly on the mayor’s side. If you threw a question at either of them, they would either have the answer or get the answer right away.”
DeLeon has lived in Aurora since he was 5 years old, having actually been born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is a graduate of East Aurora High School and got an associate’s degree in business management from Harper College. He started at City Hall in 1985, under then-Mayor David Pierce, as the superintendent of motor vehicle parking. He then became superintendent of streets before becoming director of public properties. For a while, he was director of neighborhood standards before going back to director of public properties.
“It’s been an interesting journey,” DeLeon said.
In addition to Pierce, he worked under mayors David Stover, Tom Weisner and now O’Connor. DeLeon said the city has obviously changed in size and has grown during his time at City Hall, and the crime rate has “improved greatly.” He said maybe the biggest change, more recently, “has been the image.”
“A lot of people are more positive about saying they live in Aurora,” he said.
DeLeon joked that one of the first things he’s looking forward to, most likely in 2018, is taking a vacation somewhere warm in the winter. He has been unable to do that most of his career at City Hall because he was usually involved in the snow removal system.
“I had to be mindful of the snow operations,” he said. “We view it like a public safety situation.”
Caputo is going to become vice president of administration and treasurer at the College of DuPage. He also will be considered the chief financial officer. He will be responsible for finance operations, as he is now at the city, and will work in a similar public accounting system. But his duties also will include overseeing the police and emergency management offices, risk management and the school bookstore.
“I’m personally very interested in higher education,” he said. “It’s a calling, it’s helping people enrich their own lives.”
Caputo came to Aurora in 1997 from Mount Prospect, where he was finance director. Before that he worked at Price-Waterhouse, and before that was on active duty with the U.S. Army. Caputo is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
He said he is scheduled to leave March 13, which he said would allow him to help with an orderly transition to a new director.
“I’ve achieved all the major objectives we set, I’m leaving the city in a good state, and it seemed like a good time to go,” he said.
O’Connor said the city is likely to fill both positions on an interim basis from within. With Aurora having a mayoral election in April, and a new mayor coming in, O’Connor said it would make more sense for a new mayor fill the jobs permanently.