Years ago, those visiting the Aurora City Council’s chambers at City Hall would see wooden boards displaying historic photos of past mayors and aldermen.
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After renovations to the chambers, which were completed in 2024, those boards were gone. Eventually, a digital board went up that showcased photos of current elected officials and scans of all past mayors’ photos — but not the photos of past aldermen.
That’s what first alerted Ald. Mike Saville, 6th Ward, that there could be an issue.
He started asking questions months before April 2025’s municipal election, he said, but he wasn’t getting any answers back. It wasn’t until after John Laesch was elected mayor that he learned the aldermen’s board, along with the historic photos of past aldermen, had been accidentally destroyed before digital scans could be made of the photos.
“I thought, ‘Something’s not right. Let’s find out what’s going on and get it corrected,’ not knowing I would stumble into this,” Saville said. “It was quite shocking.”
Since then, Saville has been working to find copies of all the past aldermen’s photos to recreate the board, both digitally and physically.
That would have been a “gargantuan undertaking,” considering the board held photos of each alderman that served on the Aurora City Council since the city’s form of government changed in 1977, according to Saville. He said that many of those people are no longer alive, and some of their families aren’t living around here anymore either.
Luckily, he had previously made his own copies of all the photos from 1977 to 2003, which he saved on his personal computer.
“They’re always wiping things clean here at City Hall to save space, and I didn’t trust that process,” he said.
After searching for past aldermen’s photos since the summer, Saville told The Beacon-News in January that he had found all but five. The effort was on “a good upswing,” he said at the time, and he was more hopeful at that point than he was at the beginning.
Now, Saville has all but one of the photos, and he’s in contact with the last remaining former alderman to get a copy.
“We will have actually recovered all of the missing photos that were destroyed, which is a miracle actually,” he said on Wednesday.
Although Saville had kept many photos of past aldermen, he didn’t have a photo of what the now-destroyed board looked like. But luckily, Ald. Dan Barreiro, 1st Ward, did have a photo, and that was a big help, Saville said.
Barreiro told The Beacon-News that he too believes the board should be recreated and kept for future generations.
Once all the past aldermen’s photos are collected, the next step will be to make both a digital and new physical version of the board, according to Saville. Mayor Laesch confirmed his intention to both add scanned copies of the photos to the digital board just outside the City Council chambers and to recreate a physical, wooden board.
Aurora is currently in the process of getting a quote from a local woodworking specialist for the project, Laesch said.
“The project seems doable and affordable,” he said in an email. “Preserving the history of our city is something we certainly want to do when the opportunity presents itself.”
A similar board holding photos of past mayors was also found to have been destroyed, although those photos have been digitized. The city doesn’t intend to recreate that physical board, Laesch said, as the digital one works well to capture the history.
The new physical aldermen’s board, once it is recreated, will be kept in the aldermen’s office, according to Saville. It is important to have that physical copy to make sure accidents like this don’t happen again, he said.
“We used to have control over it, and all this didn’t happen,” Saville said. “Then, it was felt that it should be up on the second floor with everybody else’s photos to combine the record, not thinking that an accident would occur.”
Between the digitized photos and the physical version, “we should be OK for the future,” he said.
It is important to have a historical perspective about all the people who did their civic duty by running for office over the years, either for mayor or alderman, according to Saville. He said the photos of past mayors, which were found recently to have also been destroyed, date back to the 1850s.
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It’s good to have a visual record of these things, especially for young people, Saville said. That way, they can learn about all the diversity the City Council has seen over the years so that they know that it is open to anyone who wants to serve their city and can connect with people.
Plus, the board has a personal connection to both Barreiro and Saville.
Barreiro, who is a retired longtime city employee, said he also knew most of the aldermen whose photos adorned the board. And Saville, who has spent possibly the most consecutive years on City Council in Aurora’s history, said he personally served with all but one of the aldermen in the photos.
“I know how hard they worked, how caring they were of their responsibilities,” Saville said. “They just wanted to improve our city, and they did. They laid a groundwork for us that we built upon, and I think the people of Aurora need to remember that.”