Terry D'Arcy's First Year As Mayor Of Joliet: How Did It Go?

JOLIET —After achieving 61 percent of Joliet's vote in last year's mayor's race against two-term incumbent Bob O'Dekirk and fellow challenger Tycee Bell, Joliet businessman and community philanthropist Terry D'Arcy believes his second year of elected office will go more smoothly.

Last week, D'Arcy met with Joliet Patch at City Hall to reflect on his first year in office and talk about his vision for 2024. Patch has published a portion of that edited interview, and the rest of it will publish later this week.

Joliet Patch: "You ran on a campaign of cleaning up Joliet through beautification efforts. Also, improve Joliet's relationship with other communities and also foster and encourage more economic development. What's your assessment of your own performance looking back on your first year?"

Mayor D'Arcy:

"So when I ran for the position as mayor, I started to look at the city, not only in today and tomorrow, but one, two, five and 20 years out. We need a long term comprehensive plan which is close to being fully baked. I would say that right now we're in the stages of drawing the architecture of the future of the city. So in doing so, we have to plot our course and you make sure your plans are exactly what you want to every wall switch and every wall outlet, to do that is intense.

"But when I came in here, the team wasn't ready to do that yet," D'Arcy explained. "We had someone in economic development, we had someone in community development, and I didn't come into team members that I knew and had worked with. So, as I came in, I was saddled with the fact that I didn't have a lot of go-to people. And as I made my requests as mayor, I found that I wasn't able to interact and interface enough to get things done. And there are some people that have left the organization as the city, so in the first year, I haven't accomplished as much as I wanted to because it takes a little longer in government than it does in private business. But I think we're really making some good headway on how we're going to get to the future ...

"We're going to come in budget on the very beginning of our long term comprehensive plan and I use the term, we have to know our now before we know our next ... What does our full 65 oblong square miles look like, and how does each one of those produce tax dollars that bring revenue and help the city grow to the future? We don't know that, so we've done what I've referred to as a lot of dartboard zoning. We've got industrial warehouses all over the place, and some of the things that bother me is that there's industrial warehouses next to forest preserve areas. What should have been residential ... If you're putting industrial buildings where you probably could have had work force housing ... what do the warehouses do for the city? A million square foot warehouse pays $1 million in real estate tax, of which the city gets about 12.8 percent, $128,000. But in the meantime, we've got to police them, we've got to fire them, we've got to maintain them, is that enough money for the next 10 years to put enough coffers in the city to make sure that it doesn't come out of our residential growth and what we need for the residents ..."

Joliet Patch: "What reflections do you have as far as things that really surprised you or made you scratch your head or made you think, wow, I didn't expect this?"

Mayor D'Arcy: "Well, the first thing I would tell you is, I walked in and there was no electronic files or paper files. So it's difficult to know what's happened in the past and how to work into the future, if you have, Ground Zero is nothing. So that was difficult to start with. We have really no particular onboarding system here. I figure if I have no paper or electronic files why would the mayor come and help me because, obviously, all of the help should have been left here and perhaps mayor's offices don't run with paper file, electronic files, I wouldn't believe that, but anyway, so that was a real big obstacle for me because two weeks in and my first 36 days roughly were with the original city manager Jim Capparelli.

"Jim Capparelli did not really have a full grip on a lot of stuff around here in my opinion, so a lot of things came at me by fire. So 33 days in my mayorhood I was handed a sheet of paper by someone not a department head and said 'You need to sign this agreement for Evergreen Terrace or we'll be in court again.' It was a sheet of paper with a signature line on it and no explanation and I said well, obviously, I can't sign that. I have no idea what my signature is going to do. What's the cause and effect? That led us to a several month project trying to unravel the whole Evergreen Terrace partnership that this city invested $15 million in some years ago. I asked questions like where's the deed to the property? Where's the operating agreement with Holsten Capital? None of that was available by finance or legal ... I had bought several businesses that had failed and I knew how to bring them back, so this was a different way for me to proceed because I was used to finding where their problems were via their old financial statements and some of the people that were in there and figuring out what had to change.

"So when I came here, it was difficult because I then had to get deeply involved in something that should have been already assessed and handled for the two years up to me coming in here ... Holsten Capital got (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) funding, $78 million, to redo the whole Evergreen Terrace project. It was thrown at me in one day, I was supposed to make a decision, and I was threatened by HUD (Housing and Urban Development). I was threatened to IDA (International Development Association) that I had to sign this, and I continued to push back and say, 'No, not until I fully understand.' So (City Councilman) Cesar Cardenas and I spent hours and weeks on the project ... and we also flew out and met with Richard Monocchio, the No. 2 of HUD, in Washington, D.C. to fully understand what the situation was in front of the city when we had to redo Evergreen Terrace, and take on this (Low Income Housing Tax Credit) funding which was never fully ever explained to me. So that was an obstacle that took three to four months, into my fifth month we were still working on that project ..."