Some Aurora residents are pushing for a way to boot a sitting mayor or alderman at-large from office before their term is up.
The group Aurora for Change, formed specifically around this issue, is trying to put two related referendum questions on the ballot in this year’s November election. Thousands of signatures are needed to get those questions on the ballot, and the group began circulating petitions on Friday.
While those formally leading the push say the initiative is non-partisan and not aimed at any specific elected official, others promoting the effort have specifically called for Aurora Mayor John Laesch to be removed from office.
If the referendum questions make it onto the ballot in November, they would ask voters if the city should adopt mechanisms that allow the mayor or an alderman at-large to be recalled.
Under the proposed mechanism, residents looking to recall an elected official would need to circulate petitions and collect at least enough signatures to equal 20% of the total votes cast in the most recent mayoral election, according to the proposed referendum question. If a recall petition got enough signatures, then the recall would go to a general vote in the next election.
The elected official would then be removed from office if the majority of voters cast their ballots in favor of the recall. The Aurora City Council would have 30 days to fill the vacancy, and if there’s more than 13 months remaining in the term, then a special election would be held to fill the seat within nine months.
One of the organizers behind Aurora for Change, Adam Pauley, said the group needs at least 4,000 signatures to get the referendum questions in front of voters in November. But, the group is looking to get around 7,000, he said.
If the group gets enough signatures and the proposed referendum questions do get on the ballot in the Nov. 3 general election, and then voters approve the measure, the recall mechanism would go into place immediately, according to petitions. The addition of a recall mechanism would technically be a change to the city’s electoral system.
Organizers want accountability, but stress nonpartisanship
Pauley said that he and the other organizer of the effort, Jayden Badillo, came up with the idea while talking about different ways to get involved. Badillo is officially Aurora for Change’s chair, while Pauley is the treasurer.
The effort is a “meaningful, tangible way” that the two could help the people of Aurora increase transparency in government and give them a recourse if they lose confidence in its leadership, according to Pauley.
“It gives voters in Aurora a fair, nonpartisan way to hold their elected public servants accountable, if something were to happen in the city, instead of having to wait through an entire election cycle,” Badillo said.
He predicted that, if the recall mechanism were to be put in place, it would increase civic engagement.
Pauley has been working on transparency and openness in other areas, too, he said. He called out his work on the elected Kane County Regional Board of School Trustees, which he said has worked to get back into compliance with open meetings laws.
For Badillo, he said the idea of democracy is the first thing he considers when deciding what candidate or cause to get behind. He believes it is a democratic thing to give voters a way to remove an elected official from office if they are doing something wrong, rather than having to wait years for an election to come.
Both Pauley and Badillo said they didn’t believe the initiative will be a hard sell to the people of Aurora. It would only empower the voters, Badillo said, and doesn’t take anything away from them.
“You’re going to go there and ask somebody, ‘Would you like to have an additional ability to hold your leaders accountable?’ That’s pretty hard to say no to,” Pauley said.
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The two young men stressed the non-partisan nature of the initiative. They are both involved in local politics, but from different sides: Pauley has run for elected office as a Democrat, while Badillo is the vice chair of the Aurora Township Republicans.
“This is bigger than any one person or any one mayoral administration,” Pauley said. “It is about the ideas.”
Some are looking to recall Mayor Laesch
However, the former chair of the Aurora Township Republicans, Danny Souri, has specifically pushed for Aurora Mayor Laesch to be recalled — and is now promoting Aurora for Change’s effort to create a recall mechanism.
Still live on the Aurora Township Republicans’ website at the time of reporting was a webpage calling for Laesch to be recalled, including a way to donate to the effort.
Badillo said that was Souri’s personal project, not one the Aurora Township Republicans’ committee ever voted on or that Badillo was involved with. Aurora for Change’s effort to create a recall mechanism is not related to Souri’s push to recall Laesch, and Souri is not officially involved in Aurora for Change, according to Badillo.
“I know Danny does want to help with circulating the petition and that kind of thing, and I assume he has his own group of volunteers who would want to do that, but that would be in his own capacity,” he said. “As chairman, I’m not going to refuse any volunteers.”
When reached for comment, Souri said that he will be “fully backing and supporting” the effort by organizing his own coalition to “get the job done.”
The organization he started for the effort, the Aurora Renewal Coalition, will be “providing full service and support,” he said. On May 3, that group’s Facebook page made a post criticizing Laesch and saying that a “referendum is coming” — which is similar to comments Souri has made on his personal Facebook page.
Former Mayor Richard Irvin, who Laesch unseated in last year’s election, is also publicly supporting Aurora for Change’s efforts to create a recall mechanism. And, like Souri, Irvin is specifically tying the effort to a push to recall Laesch.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Irvin laid out a plan to use the proposed recall mechanism to recall Laesch as early as April 2027.
Since Laesch took office, Irvin has been a vocal critic of the new administration. Laesch has similarly been a vocal critic of Irvin’s administration, both before the election and after.
Again like Souri, Irvin has been involved with the Republican Party — he ran for governor in the GOP primary in 2022, and he launched a group called the Black Republican Mayors Association. The state Democratic Party targeted him during last year’s mayoral election, helping Laesch in the process, despite Aurora city elections being ostensibly non-partisan.
Recall efforts in other Illinois communities have faced challenges
The state of Illinois provides only a recall mechanism for the governor seat, not for any other elected official. That hasn’t stopped some from trying.
For instance, in 2024 there was an uphill effort to create a mayoral recall mechanism through a referendum in Chicago.
A push to recall Dolton’s mayor made it further: it got onto the ballot and was approved by the majority of voters. But it was later struck down by an appellate court.
Specifically, the Dolton Village Board voted in late 2021 to place two questions on the ballot in the same upcoming election the following year. One asked voters if Dolton should establish a mechanism to recall the mayor, and the second asked whether the mayor at the time, Tiffany Henyard, should be recalled.
Both were approved by voters, but the appellate court ruled that the referendum questions had been improperly drafted after Henyard’s lawyers argued that the two questions could not appear on the same ballot, since the mechanism wasn’t in place at the time of the vote, according to past reporting from the Daily Southtown.
That case wasn’t the first time Dolton tried to put in place a recall mechanism. In 2016, the Village Board voted to create a recall ordinance, but it was also shot down by an appellate court, which said a recall mechanism needed to be established by referendum because it alters the terms of elected officials, according to earlier Daily Southtown reporting.
Despite the challenges recall efforts have faced in Illinois, attorney Burt Odelson told The Beacon-News that he believes referendums to create local recall mechanisms are legal — as long as the wording is precise enough to withstand legal challenges. He was involved in the more recent Dolton mayoral recall effort and, according to his firm’s website
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, is considered an expert in governmental and election law.“I think any good municipal or election lawyer will tell you that, if worded properly, this type of question is legal to go on the ballot to let the people decide what type of government they want,” he said. “It’s a change in the form of government, is what it is.”
Odelson wouldn’t comment specifically on the language of the questions proposed by Aurora for Change, since he didn’t write them. The city of Aurora’s legal department, as well as former Aurora Corporation Counsel Rick Veenstra, similarly declined to comment on the legality of the proposed questions.
The questions have gone through legal review, according to Pauley.
Although more recent recall efforts in Illinois have not seen success, Buffalo Grove did recall a sitting alderman in 2010, which was seen as the first such case in Illinois history.