SOUTH SHORE — A sea of hands went up when Ald. Gregory Mitchell asked for questions or concerns at his first town hall meeting as 7th Ward alderman Monday.
The event at the Savoy Banquet Hall, 2621 E. 75th St., was the first of three town hall meetings for Mitchell, who was sworn in May 18 as alderman after defeating incumbent Natashia Holmes on a platform of improving services.
“I’m accustomed to prioritizing issues and coming up with solutions,” Mitchell said, urging the first round of questions for the alderman his panel of five city departments, two utilities and two police districts.
That’s when the first wave hit the freshman alderman.
Residents lobbed complaints about rogue halfway houses, potholes old enough to attend grade school, streets flooding to form “Lake Euclid” and worries that new gas meters could put homes at greater risk of exploding.
“You all writing this down? You getting this?” Mitchell would frequently say to his staff in the back of the room of about 100 people.
Mitchell was elected promising to focus on ward issues and improving services. On June 13 he opened the ward “service center,” what most alderman would call their ward office.
Constituents were already complimenting him Monday for having cleaned out a gutter clogged since William Beavers was alderman in 2007 or a tree that Sandi Jackson never got trimmed during her tenure as alderman.
Several residents did pry about his stance on controversial plans by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to raise property taxes. Mitchell demurred, saying he wanted to exhaust all options before deciding to raise taxes but understood the city’s difficult fiscal position and was open to raising property taxes as possibly a necessary option.
But he also showed he was already pulling the levers of power beyond the day-to-day of getting streets swept and potholes filled.
Mitchell said he met last week with the city’s Department of Planning on the possibility of creating several new TIF districts in the ward.
The ward already has four, but new districts would allow Mitchell to keep more of the 7th Ward’s tax money out of the city’s general coffers and give him a big say what kinds of new projects would get funding.
The news passed largely unnoticed by the crowd as Mitchell switched from calling people to having people line up and back to calling on people as he got the hang of running a meeting where 100 people have a question and a city department representative might or might not have an answer beyond “Call 311,” “Call 911.”
Mitchell will hold two more town hall meetings this month.
South Chicago residents will get a town hall meeting from 6-8 p.m. Monday at the South Coles Language Academy, 8441 S. Yates Blvd.
Calumet Heights, South Deering and Jeffery Manor’s town hall will be from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 28 at Compassion Baptist Church, 2650 E. 95th St.
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