March 19, 2025
RATS, TRASH, TOTES ARE DOMINATING ISSUE IN SKOKIE MAYORAL RACE

There are a lot of rats in Skokie, and I don’t mean the politicians. Villagers must be buying a lot of food and not eating all of it, thereby creating a lot of bio-degrading food waste and spoilage which crams a lot of 64-gallon garbage carts and provides a lot of tasty cuisine for the chubby critters.

This irritates many Skokie voters.

The April 1 municipal election is not about thwarting any threats to democracy, or saving the soul of Skokie, or about reproductive rights, or halting the onward march of Trumpism. Instead the thundering chorus is about getting rid of those rats. How mundane can you get? It’s a quality-of-life issue.

Possible solutions involve bringing in ICE and deporting all the rodents to Evanston or, more likely, Chicago. Or bring in Brandon Johnson’s approach which is to not exterminate the execrable rats but stick them in a shelter, give them three meals a day at government expense and proclaim success.

Some Skokie politicians conceived of food waste receptacles as an anti-rat ploy. These compost bins are where citizens can dump their leftovers and rotting fruit. There are several the village and are serviced by a private contractor. The downside is that you have to stuff a stinky garbage bag in your front seat and drive to the waste box. The upside is that the stink of the receptacle will attract rats away from residential totes and commercial dumpsters. Let’s just hope you don’t live next to one of those.

OK, that’s enough droll, satiric humor.

To be fair, the Village of Skokie has increased its rat abatement resources last year. It stated on its Web site that the village has observed a regional increase in rat activity since 2019 while experiencing several consecutive mild winters. Rat activity peaks in the Chicago area during warmer months, from late spring through early fall, the village said

“There are lots of rats everywhere” in the suburbs and an army of them in Chicago, said Skokie mayor George Van Dusen, who is retiring after 26 years. Van Dusen, age 81, is an iconic figure in North Shore and Chicago Lakefront politics, having been congressman Sidney Yates’ (D-9) in-district top aide for 26 years (1972-1998) and also a part-time Skokie trustee. He was appointed mayor in 1999 and won election 6 times, most unopposed.

“People (in Skokie) do not want divisiveness,” he said.

Nor do they want rats. There are 3 candidates for mayor – Charlie Isho, David “Azi” Lifsics and Ann Tennes  – and the wedge issue seems to be who is the most vigorously anti-rat or, conversely, who is the least pro-rat. “It’s a bit more nuanced than that,” Van Dusen chided me. I guess that means nobody wants to make a rat the village mascot. But they do want to heap some of the blame on Van Dusen, who had the audacity last year to slice tote pickups from twice to once a week for Skokie’s 20,000-plus households.

“It was expensive. And people were not putting out their totes” a second time, the mayor said. He’s got that right. A 64-gallon tote can accommodate 64 one-gallon milk jugs. That’s a whole lot of household waste – and then multiply that by two per week. That’s 128 milk jugs over 7 days. Nobody can eat and create that much organic waste in that time span, especially since residents have a second tote for their recyclable (paper, plastic, glass) waste.

There are nevertheless other anti-rat options. Like clean your plate. Eat your leftovers. Buy less food. Eat less food.

However, one of Skokie’s most attractive characteristics is its diversity. A lot of people eat a lot of different food.

It has an Assyrian Arab population of almost 20,000 according to the 2020 census, a large Asian Indian/Pakistani and South Asian population, and Blacks (about 7 percent) and Latinos about 10 percent).

Lifsics, the sole Jewish candidate in a village which is 28 percent Jewish – way down from 56 percent in the 1950s – is the most adamant about more tote pickups. Esho, who is an Assyrian-American, essentially ignores the issue. “His (Isho’s) campaign is just a bunch of platitudes,” said Van Dusen. Tennes was a longtime village employee in the communications department. She is “studying” the rats/totes issue. All are Democrats but the election is non-partisan.

The Democratic establishment has coalesced behind Lifsics, who has been endorsed by Van Dusen, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-9), state Senator Laura Fine (D-Glenview), lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton and most village trustees.

Identity politics, which characterizes so many contemporary races, is not really a factor in Skokie. It doesn’t especially matter that Tennes is a woman or Lifsics is Jewish. In the past the Jewish vote invariably exceeded the Jewish population by at least a third, so if that segment numbers 28 percent of 67,824 then the Jewish base is around 19,000. In other words, non-Jewish voters didn’t vote in proportion to their numbers.

That is changing. In 2021 when Van Dusen was unopposed for mayor he got 5,290 votes. There are 45,632 registered voters (RVs) in 39 Skokie precincts, so Van Dusen got one-ninth of them. More than 40,000 registered voters did not vote. 2021 turnout was 11.6 percent and it won’t be much higher than 15 percent at best in 2025, which is 6,700 votes. There is no great excitement about de-ratting Skokie. So just 2,500 votes is enough to win – which is just 3.7 percent of the population and 5.5 percent of the RVs. That is not a steep mountain to climb

My prediction: Lifsics is the best organized and funded. He will have at least 6 mailings to “hard” Democrats  who vote in every primary and election. Tennes is stumbling around. Esho is concentrating on his Assyrian base and they are motivated. “They are closely bunched,” said Van Dusen of the contenders, “but Tennes could be the spoiler.” In other words, she drains votes from Lifsics. That will occur. But Lifsics will squeak out a 100-vote win over Esho.

SOME BACKGROUND: Skokie was established in 1888 by German Luxembourger farmers and initially named Niles Centre. It was later renamed “Skokie,” which is the Potawatomi term for “marsh.” Until post-WWII it was a 10.6 square mile bucolic pastureland with a population of just 14,832 in the 1940s. But Black immigration from the U.S. South during the war prompted massive Jewish relocation from West Side Chicago neighborhoods like Lawndale and Garfield Park to Skokie. Its population surged to 59,354 in the 1950s. Thousands of tract homes, both ranch and brick bungalow, were rapidly built.

And the émigrés brought a liberal, pro-FDR, pro-Democratic politics with them. Successive censuses showed Skokie’s post-1950s population flat, hitting  63,348 in 2000 and 67,824 in 2020. But the demographics shifted considerably over the past 20 years. The White population has dropped from 41,548 to 33,697, from 65.4 percent to 49.7. The Census Bureau fudged the numbers, combining Middle-Eastern National Origin with Whites, of which half are Jewish -- of whom a lot have fled to Deerfield and Buffalo Grove, and the more affluent to Highland Park.

The median income for Skokians is around $43,000 ($93,000 for a family), which is less than neighbors like Glenview, Evanston and Lincolnwood, and even Chicago’s Northwest Side. The average home value is between $300,000 to $400,000. Skokie is not quite Lower Middle-Class but it seems to be stagnating. Lifsics, if he wins, will likely be Skokie’s last Jewish mayor.

9TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT:  Way, way back in the day, like the 1950s, the North Shore 10th  District was a bedrock of genteel Republicanism, dominated by snooty Evanston. Their congresswoman was Marguerite Stitt Church, who was replaced by Don Rumsfeld (R) in 1962 and went on to be Nixon’s chief-of-staff and Bush’s secretary of defense – and architect of the Gulf War. Rumsfeld was replaced in 1969 with hardcore conservative Phil Crane (R), who beat liberal Jewish Skokie Democrat Edward Warman twice.

Time and remaps have merged the south North Shore with Chicago’s north Lakefront into Yates’ old 9th District, with tentacles stretching out to Wauconda. The seat is held by Schakowsky, elected to succeed Yates and now age 81. The Skokie Succession will be a minor blip compared to the Schakowsky Succession in 2026 when she is expected to retire.

Read more Analysis & Opinion from Russ Stewart at Russstewart.com

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