FOIA Gras 6th Ward Voting Guide
Onto the Main Act of the Early Voting Eve!
If you want to skip directly to the sixth ward voter guide, click here.
This is the last email you’ll receive from me today and one of the last election emails you’ll get. I have a couple more endorsement-related ones coming out tomorrow, but we’re almost to the end, people! Go vote so I don’t have to talk about this for another 4 years.
Evanston’s Sixth Ward
Evanston’s Sixth Ward is on the upper left hand side of Evanston. The ward contains two schools, Lincolnwood and Willard. The ward mostly consists of single family homes, however there are larger apartments and condos along Central Avenue. Given the proximity to the new Foster School (in the Fifth Ward) and District 65’s budget issues, the potential closure of these buildings has been a major issue in the election here.
There are two candidates in this race, Tom Suffredin and Candance Chow. Suffredin is the incumbent and has been alderman since 2017.
This has been a 🌶️ election, with some back and forth that made various media:
Evanston candidates Chow, Suffredin jab at each other’s ethics in Sixth Ward race (Chicago Tribune)
6th Ward incumbent Suffredin refutes challenger Chow’s ‘conflict of interest’ claims (Daily Northwestern)
Chow, Suffredin trade blows as Sixth Ward race stays tense (Evanston Roundtable)
Like most Evanston residents, I’m conflict avoidant and think some of the criticism both ways has been a little unfair. So I wanted to give them both a chance to address the heat. I asked Candance the following question regarding her time on the District 65 Board;
I personally think some of the heat you've received related to your time on the D65 Board hasn't been fair. For one, when you left the Board, the District did have around $30 million in reserves thanks to your work on the 2017 Referendum. However, the money is all gone, partially due to Dr. Horton's mismanagement. Can you elaborate more on how he was hired and what information you and the Board had at the time?
And I feel somewhat similarly about the accusations regarding Suffredin’s work and asked him about this;
I personally think some of the heat you’ve received related to your work as a lobbyist has been unfair - you’re allowed to make a living and (as far as I can tell) you’ve followed best practices involving disclosure and abstention. Can you elaborate more on best practices you follow for transparency?
After that, I gave them both the same two questions on issues relevant to the sixth ward.
I’ve received a lot of emails from nervous parents about the closure of Lincolnwood. I haven’t seen any evidence that Lincolnwood is particularly targeted, but D65 is going to have to close one or more schools and Lincolnwood is a potential candidate due to proximity to Kingsley + Foster. How can the City Council be more involved with D65’s long-term planning to ensure 6th ward parents have an advocate?
Along those same lines, D65 was mostly left out of the negotiations involving the new stadium. I think this is a real missed opportunity to build something like the Kalamazoo Promise or at least fund the Foster School. In what ways can the City Council help bridge a better relationship between the public schools and
Northwestern?
You can read the question responses at this link.
tldr; Let the Robot do the Work
If you don’t feel like reading the whole PDF, I plugged their answers into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize their “their general worldview, politics and positions.” It provided me with the following answers, which are less useful in this race than the others.
Tom Suffredin: A transparency-focused incumbent, Suffredin opposes school closures, criticizes D65’s financial mismanagement, and supports aligning city planning with school needs while pushing for stronger community negotiations with Northwestern.
Candance Chow: A fiscally-minded reformer, Chow highlights her role in securing a D65 surplus, advocates for a stronger city-school partnership, and seeks a more structured approach to holding Northwestern accountable for community contributions.
Again, you can read the human-written full responses from candidates at this link.
Tom, your coverage of the issues and candidates in this election is a real community service. It represents a considerable amount of work. Thank you.
I think my problem with Candace is that she has taken zero responsibility for the secretive hiring process for Horton. She claims the district had all this money and she had to step down for personal reasons, but where has been for the past 4 years? She has said 0 about Horton's mismanagement, the illegal expenditures, and just hides behind the dollars that were there before she left and then questions Tom's ethics when she is the one that has an actual ethics violation against her. She has also bounced from political position to political position and that's a concern to me. I just think her tactics have been wrong from the start, and if she cared so much about the district and the city council, she should have been more vocal about what was going on over the past 4 years.