Dupage Policy Journal

Members of the Wheaton Community Relations Committee addressed some concerns they have with city processes.

“It doesn’t seem fiscally responsible for the city to leave commission seats unfilled and force budgets to go unutilized or underutilized,” Erica Nelson, vice chair for the Community Relations Commission, said during the meeting. “These funds are earmarked to help foster community relationships with the city, and we were unable to do so because of the inaction of the mayor to bring applicants forward in a consistent and timely manner. We’re looking for that consistency. When you look at the applicant turnaround for other commissions that had openings, like the historic, bike and pedestrian commission, fine arts and cultural commission, and the commission on aging, their turnaround time ranged from anywhere as little as one week to three months. However, the community relations commission turnaround took 3-7 months.”

The board uploaded a live stream of its public meeting to the city’s Vimeo.

At their March 6th council meeting, city officials from Wheaton heard from Rachel Bautista, the chair of the Community Relations Committee, and Erica Nelson, the vice chair of the committee, and Laurie Swanson Oberhelman from the Fine and Cultural Arts committee. They all came to share some of their thoughts and concerns about the process of reviewing applications and filling vacant seats on the commissions and boards in the city. The city had recently amended its ordinances pertaining to this process, which changed it from being a full city council review and decision, to the responsibility of the mayor.

The board also discussed an ordinance amending the Official Motor Vehicle And Traffic Schedules.

Bautista shared her frustrations with the recent change, explaining that over the last year, her committee (CRC) had seven open positions and 16 applications for those chairs, yet it took a year for the committee to have full membership again. She shared that one of the members recently appointed on February 21st waited seven months for her appointment process after being approved. She complained the selection criteria were not public and the commissions had no input on the candidates chosen for their committees, with some recent candidates they thought to have great expertise not chosen. Nelson shared that because of the delay in filling the positions on their CRC, they had to cancel two of their events and left 80% of their available funding unspent in 2022. Oberhelmen shared similar sentiments, asking for the review process to be examined again to allow more input from commissions on potential candidates.

Mayor Phillip Suess responded to some of these comments. He explained that commission seats are filled at the discretion of the mayor, as per the city code. He also said most of the six vacancies that currently exist for city boards are empty because there are no active applications for them. He said his process includes sending around possible nominations to all city council members before officially recommending them, and that all nomination decisions are hard to make but need to be made nonetheless.

The board will meet again at 7 p.m. on Monday at the Wheaton City Hall at 303 West Wesley Street.

“The nomination process does involve making decisions, in many cases, there are multiple applications for the same position, and choices need to be made. In making choices, I evaluate experiences and backgrounds relative to the skills, background, and experience already on the applicable commission,” Suess said. “There is a strong desire to establish and maintain a diversity of skills, backgrounds, and experiences on each commission. Applications that are not acted upon are retained for two years. Appointments to a board or commission are not an entitlement, if anything there is a strong bias towards appointing individuals to their desired commission, given that residents are donating their time to volunteer positions based on their personal interests and desire to be involved in our community.”