The city’s Finance and Budget Committee is set to have new resident members for the first time since its creation, albeit with opposition from at least four councilmembers to one of Mayor Daniel Biss’ selections, Candance Chow.
Biss picked Chow, a recent council candidate, over incumbent Leslie McMillan, who says she intended to apply for a second term but apparently did so too late.
The eight-person committee was created in September 2021 on a referral from Councilmember Clare Kelly (1st Ward), who currently serves as a member alongside Jonathan Nieuwsma (4th Ward), Tom Suffredin (6th), Parielle Davis (7th) and Matt Rodgers (8th). The remaining three slots are filled by residents picked by the mayor and confirmed by a City Council vote, and those seats have until now been filled by McMillan, David Livingston and Shari Reiches, who were appointed as a group on Sept. 13, 2021.
Those resident members’ first terms have expired, and Biss shared his new picks with councilmembers through City Clerk Stephanie Mendoza on Sept. 15: reupping Livingston for a second term and selecting Chow and Therese McGuire, a professor of strategy at the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, for new terms.
But while Reiches shared months earlier that she planned to step away at the end of her term, McMillan told the RoundTable she had “every intention of reupping.”
“There’s an enormous learning curve, so it’d been my assumption I would stay on,” McMillan said, “and certainly be able to use the expertise that the city had invested in me.”
Chow’s selection is opposed by Councilmembers Kelly, Suffredin, Davis and Rodgers, who have tended to align with each other and against Mayor Biss on contested issues since the beginning of the current term. The four co-signed an email sent to Biss on Friday, a copy of which was shared with the RoundTable, in which they “strongly urge” him to reconsider picking Chow due to their concerns over both her qualifications and how the appointment was done in the first place.
“Given the importance of the Finance & Budget Committee and the need for members with demonstrable financial expertise,” the four wrote, “we cannot support Ms. Chow’s appointment if it is brought before the full Council for approval.”
That approval vote for all three appointments is expected to be on the agenda at council’s next meeting on Monday.
An issue of timing
While McMillan did officially apply for a second term, emails reviewed by the RoundTable show it was received by the clerk’s office on Sept. 15 around 7:30 a.m. — just hours after Biss sent his selection email around 1:30 a.m. Mendoza had received applications from McGuire, Livingston and Chow about two weeks earlier, and she sent the group to the mayor for consideration on Sept. 3.
The four opposed councilmembers took issue with this timing and noted that the seats were not posted on the city’s dedicated vacancies webpage, arguing this “limit[ed] transparency” and “undermines the integrity of the selection process.”
But in a phone call with the RoundTable, Mayor Biss said he “actually waited a long time” for any last-minute applications before officially appointing those three, only receiving McMillan’s after the fact. He explained that under a council rule requiring two weeks’ notice of appointments, Sept. 15 was the cutoff to make selections that could go up for a vote at this Monday’s council meeting, and thus “not create a gap” where the committee was underpopulated.
“I don’t usually wait until the last minute, usually I would just interview someone, they’d be good, and I’d email Stephanie [Mendoza] and be like, ‘Hey, I’m appointing this person,’” Biss said. “I deliberately didn’t do that this time to hold it open for as long as possible and see if anyone else applied, and no one did.”
The council’s next regular meeting after Monday is on Oct. 13, one day before the next finance committee meeting on Oct. 14.
Biss added that the committee’s webpage showed that the three members’ terms would expire in September. While this page doesn’t specify an end date, other committee pages show that term expirations correspond to the date of their confirmation votes. For example, McMillan’s appointment was approved the same night Mary Rosinski’s five-year term to the Parks and Recreation Board, and the board’s webpage shows Rosinki’s term expiring on Sept. 13, 2026.
For her part, McMillan believed she had until the end of the month to apply, and said she never indicated she intended to leave. But in emails about her application with Biss and Mendoza, the clerk told her that “without an application in our system, I could not have known you wished to continue serving on the committee.”
Biss said he didn’t speak to any of the three he selected in advance, only interviewing them after they’d applied. Chow told the RoundTable she had been checking the city’s website for potential committee spots over the summer and noticed the finance committee’s terms would be up in September, and McGuire said she heard of the incoming vacancy left by Reiches from Councilmember Nieuwsma after she gave public comment to the council on the local grocery tax proposal in late August.
“State and local public finance, the economics of the state and local public sector, is my area of expertise,” McGuire said of why she applied. “I don’t want to be a policy maker myself, but trying to inform the policy debate, and particularly around these issues where I feel like I have some expertise and experience.”
Livingston did not respond to requests for comment.
Calling experience into question
The opposed councilmembers also argue that Chow “does not meet the necessary qualifications” for the committee outlined in the city code, which requires resident members have “financial expertise,” meaning they’ve “held finance positions for at least two (2) years.”
Chow shared part of her application with the RoundTable, where she cited both her professional experience in “large corporate cost restructuring” as a consultant and her elected experience on the District 65 school board, where she spent two years each as the finance chair and board president. She told the RoundTable she believes her school board experience in particular is “directly applicable” and “probably closer than pretty much any other” type of experience to managing the city’s finances.
“There’s large capital expenditures, there’s obviously operating expenses, you’re dealing with tax-based funding,” Chow said of her work on the school board. “I’m familiar with all of that, and you know, had a track record of doing a great job as the finance chair of District 65.”
The four councilmembers disagree, writing that the “volunteer work” lacks the “depth or scope of full-time financial detailed experience and expertise expected” for the volunteer committee position, and contrasting her with the three prior resident members. McMillan is a senior vice president and private wealth adviser at U.S. Bank, Livingston is a retired vice president of business development and treasury at Illinois Tool Works and Reiches was a founding principal of Rappaport Reiches Capital Management.
“I don’t know how you would be on this committee without a really strong understanding of fund accounting,” McMillan said. “It was a huge investment of the city into my knowledge, and a huge investment that I made.”
Biss told the RoundTable he asked for Corporation Counsel Alex Ruggie to weigh in on the experience question, and said she concluded Chow’s experience meets the code’s requirement.
“My nonlawyer reaction was, it deliberately says ‘finance position,’ not finance job or paid finance position,” Biss said. “But as soon as people indicated disagreement, I kicked it to our corporation counsel and got back an opinion that it’s, in fact, in keeping with the requirement.”
‘Not a campaign donor’
Beyond issues of timing and qualifications, McMillan also suggested the choice had more political motivations, saying at one point that she “is not a campaign donor.”
The three people selected by Biss have each contributed to his current congressional campaign: McGuire pitched in $500 on May 28, and Chow and Livingston each gave $2,500 on June 30, the final day included in candidates’ second-quarter financial disclosures. Biss raised $71,215 on that day alone, over 10% of his total Q2 fundraising.
The joint councilmember letter did not mention this at all, but Councilmember Kelly alluded to it in a separate written statement.
“This choice not only disregards the standards we put in place, but also raises troubling questions about the motivations behind the appointment,” Kelly wrote. “This move undermines the integrity of the committee and raises concerns about political motivations taking precedence over public interest. Evanston deserves better.”
Kelly also called attention to Chow’s recent run for Sixth Ward councilmember against Suffredin, a member of the committee. Suffredin declined to comment beyond the joint letter.
When asked about the donations, the mayor gave a firm answer.
“Literally every applicant for this position was a supporter of my campaign,” Biss said, and the notion that support of my campaign influences decisions is utterly preposterous.”
The appointees gave similar responses: McGuire said her donation had “zero to do” with her selection, and Chow said she “absolutely” doesn’t think there’s a link.
“Yes, I support Daniel Biss for Congress … I also want to continue to support and serve Evanston,” Chow said. “And certainly, there’s no linkage between one and the other.”
