Candice Russell watched her 4-year-old son hurl a ball at the chain-link fence in his front yard and laugh, and then looked past him to the three men standing in a huddle nearby on the sidewalk.
“People out here have nothing to do,” his mother said. “They need jobs.”
The bookkeeper’s family moved to Evanston about nine months ago. Russell said she was struck by the littering and loitering on her Jackson Avenue block.
“This street right here is crazy,” she said. “This whole place looks filthy to me.”
The family lives in Evanston’s Fifth Ward, where on Tuesday, voters will choose between incumbent Ald. Delores Holmes (5th) and challenger Adrian Dortch as their city council representative.
The mother said she’s unsure of whom she will support, but Rick Francellno, who lives below her in the brick three-family home, prominently displays a green sign in support of Dortch.
“I’ve known Adrian since he was a child,” said Francellno, having a cigarette on his porch. “He is a beautiful young man.”
Francellno said he, like Russell, is considering safety as a major issue in his vote.
He said police presence in the neighborhood is often more threatening than reassuring, recalling the time he was questioned while taking an early morning walk. Upon filing a complaint, he discovered an officer reported that he attacked him.
“He told a blatant lie,” Francellno said. “They have guns, they have tazers, they have mace, and they’re claiming I came after them in the dark with an axe handle.”
Francellno’s aldermanic choice said he recently experienced something similar when two police officers arbitrarily stopped him.
“These are narcotic detectives and they pulled me over,” said Dortch, 31, who ran in 2007 unsuccessfully for positions on both Evanston school boards. “This is big time racial profiling.”
He said changes to the recently-formed Citizens’ Police Advisory Committee, including the ability to post complaints online, could forge better communication between residents and law enforcement and “hold the police accountable.”
Holmes, 70, is an active member of the League of Women voters who has served the ward for four years, said her safety plan would rely on Evanston residents.
“I want to work with residents on safety so they can take neighborhood back,” she said. “With a block watch program people can take ownership of their community.”
She also said she had plans for keeping the neighborhood youth out of trouble.
“We want to provide some more opportunities for young people, for jobs,” Holmes said. “Things like community builders. In high school we want them to be in some kind of vocational training so that if they’re not college bound they can at least have a skill.”
Both Holmes and Dortch have pioneered ward programs to engage students.
Driving around the neighborhood Wednesday morning, Dortch pointed out the large number of unemployed residents. He said the problem starts much earlier than high school.
The neighborhood’s lack of a school, and the resulting long commute for students, causes Fifth Ward children to fall behind by the time they matriculate into Evanston Township High School, Dortch said.
“You get classified as special education, you go to high school special education and we all know there’s no special education college,” he said. “So you come back onto the streets and then you get caught for selling drugs. It’s all part of a wicked system. That’s been for decades what’s happening in the community.”
Dortch said he had been in special education at ETHS after attending Lincolnwood Elementary and Haven Middle schools. He said it was through a teacher who “took time to educate me and get me out of that system,” that he graduated, attended Columbia College Chicago and started his own production company.
Though the candidates mostly agree on safety issues, their visions for the ward diverge sharply at Simpson Street, the site of the proposed “West Side Plan” for new townhouses and businesses on a largely vacant plot.
Holmes supports it because the businesses will help share the neighborhood’s tax burden.
“I don’t know any other way to do it,” she said.
Though few will be physically displaced, Dortch said he believes the increases in property values could price people out of the neighborhood.
Though challenging an incumbent is always difficult, Dortch said Holmes has an inordinate amount of name recognition in the community. It appears on the building that houses Evanston’s branch of Family Focus, where Holmes served as director and Dortch volunteered before starting his own program for students.
“Going up against Holmes is not easy,” Dortch said. “A lot of people know me as Mr. Adrian, so the last name Dortch threw a lot of people off. I actually had to go door to door and say ‘no no it’s Mr. Adrian. It’s me. I’m the guy with the afro.”
