Why all 8 Naperville council seats up at once
The last time all seats on the Naperville City Council were up for election at the same time was 1969.
There were five seats on the council back then, and they represented a city of about 22,000 people.
This year, in a city of nearly 145,000, it's happening again.
Because of a series of events related to whether council members should be elected at-large or by districts, all eight seats on the council are expiring this spring.
The field of 20 candidates is large enough to make it difficult on groups such as the Naperville Area Homeowners Confederation, which typically hosts a candidates forum before elections. Instead of planning one evening for voters to hear from council candidates, the organization has to hold two separate events.
"For the first time, we're doing two separate forums for city council," confederation President Bob Fischer said. "In the past, we would put all the council candidates together for one, but with 20 candidates, it's just not going to work."
Sufficient to make a single forum unwieldy, the field of 20 was not crowded enough to trigger a primary election in February. That would have required 33 candidates. So all 20 people who filed petitions to run for council will be on the ballot April 7.
The reason all eight seats are up at once, city spokeswoman Linda LaCloche says, is because four seats were assigned two-year terms in the 2013 election. Understanding the reason the four seats held by council members Judith Brodhead, Paul Hinterlong, Doug Krause and David Wentz were elected to two-year terms requires a short trip into Naperville election history.
It was November 2010 when more than 28,000 Naperville residents voted to establish a system in which five of the eight council members would be elected by districts. The district system was to start in 2015, so LaCloche said the city prepared by drawing maps and planning to have all eight council members up for election in 2015. That way, five of them could be elected from the newly drawn segments of the city and the remaining three could be elected at-large as usual.
By 2013, however, a group of influential residents had come forward against the idea of splitting council representation into districts. The group placed a new referendum question on the April 2013 ballot seeking to reverse the previous decision.
That left the city in a lurch. Plans to create the district system beginning in 2015 had to move forward, LaCloche said, because that was the "will of the people" the last time the issue was taken to voters. So the city determined that the winners of the four seats up for election in spring 2013 would be assigned two-year terms that would expire just in time to be elected again under the new system in 2015.
But the 2013 election itself also had to move forward, and in that election, voters reversed the 2010 decision to create districts. Roughly 67 percent of the 14,303 votes cast on the issue came down in favor of retaining the at-large system instead of switching to a partial district setup.
The problem was that the four newly re-elected or elected council members - incumbents Brodhead, Hinterlong and Krause and newcomer Wentz - had just been elected to two-year terms and that couldn't be changed. So the city remained on track to have all eight council seats expire at the same time - in 2015.
Now the city has to endure one election to choose representatives for all eight seats, as well as a new mayor to succeed the retiring George Pradel.
But LaCloche says the logistics of this election will put the city back on track to avoid future contests with all eight seats up for grabs.
The top four vote-getters will receive four-year terms and will be up for election again in 2019. The candidates who receive the fifth- through eighth-most votes will be assigned to two year terms, with their seats next up for election in 2017.
"That would put us back on a staggered schedule," LaCloche said.
Voters just have to sort through 20 candidates and make it through April 7 first.