Asked about calling the Archer project a “debacle,” Susana Mendoza says she didn’t discuss the issue with previous ally and Archer protest promoter Juan Rangel

During mayoral hopeful Susana Mendoza’s speech today at City Club of Chicago, she lived up to her quip that “God has gifted me with endless energy.” The current Comptroller of Illinois, a former state representative and City Clerk of Chicago, was quite spirited during that talk and afterwards at a press conference. She focused on discussing her solutions to what she called our city’s financial, public safety, and leadership crises.

Mendoza also said some interesting things about transit, including a detailed discussion of public transportation in Taiwan, as well as her idea to expand the Chicago Riverwalk south and west to Chinatown and Little Village. I may report what she said about those topics in the near future.

But for starters, let me share an interesting exchange I had with the candidate about a subject that is of particular interest to Streetsblog Chicago readers. You may recall that in early August, Mendoza appeared today on WBEZ’s “Ask the Candidate” series, hosted by Sasha-Ann Simons.

When a caller asked Mendoza about strategies to reduce car dependence, she responded by expressing frustration with traffic jams, and then mentioned “a lot of bike lanes that are very controversial in the city.” While she noted that she rides bicycles herself, she argued that “the bike lanes make sense in certain areas, but not in all areas.”

“And that’s a conversation that I know is a touchy one to have, but I think it’s an honest one that we have to have.” the candidate said on the radio. “Because, for example, what we saw with the debacle of the bike lanes on Archer Avenue. It used to be like a shortcut for a lot of people – a fast-moving throughway, and now it became a parking lot.”

She was referencing the recent Complete Streets project on the corridor in Brighton Park, which included pedestrian improvements, and bus boarding islands, new turn lanes for drivers, as well as protected bike lanes. Obviously, the question of whether a retail-lined street in a dense residential neighborhood should be “a fast-moving throughway” is subject to debate. That’s especially true since Brighton Park, has seen many more collisions than the average Chicago community.

I wrote about that topic in August, but I asked Mendoza directly about the issue during today’s presser. The transcript that follows here is edited a bit for clarity and brevity.

“On WBEZ, you called the Archer Avenue traffic safety project ‘a debacle,'” I noted. “Can you reassure voters that if you are elected, you will support projects that create better conditions for walking, biking, transit, and driving?”

“For sure,” she replied. “Let me just say that 140-character posts are difficult, because there’s nuance in every decision that the City has to make, or a human has to make.”

One of SBC’s previous tweets on this matter, featuring a quote from the local City Council member Ald. Julia Ramirez (12th) defending the Archer project.

“I think that wasn’t a tweet, that was an interview I did where I talked about it,” Mendoza clarified. “Why? Because I was out there talking to business owners on that strip, and I also used to represent that area of the city when I was a state representative. So it’s not a foreign community to me. It’s frankly my prior community, where I still go, I still eat there, and I eat it with my own eyes.”

“And so there are going to be people who think that’s the greatest thing that every happened,” Mendoza continued. “And then there are the people who live there, who work there, who own businesses there, who have seen it in a much less pretty set of glasses.”

“I didn’t get into the weeds in this [WBEZ] interview, but if there’s one person in this city who really takes this issue of rider safety seriously, it’s me,” Mendoza shared. “My brother-in-law Ben [Szostak] was killed while riding his bicycle training for a decathlon.”

“It completely changed our family dynamic,” Mendoza added. “It breaks my heart thinking about it, so I’m not going to talk about it much more, because I get emotional about it. But having said that, of course, public safety matters, and making sure that we have safe streets for our cyclists matters.”

“But there’s nuance in all of this,” she continued. “Chicagoans need to know that I’m going to be a mayor who’s been personally impacted, in a very negative way, by the loss of a beloved family member who was riding his bike, not in Chicago, [but] it doesn’t matter where it happened.”

“It matters that we have to have safe streets for our cyclists, but we also have to have a balanced approach to how we deal with this,” Mendoza said. “And just because you feel very strongly about one thing, doesn’t mean that everybody else in the community feels that same way and that your voice is any more important than the others. So my job is going to be to do what’s best and what’s right in every community, and what works in one community might not necessarily work in a different community. There’s nuance to these decisions.”

“I’m sorry about your brother-in-law,” I responded. “Now, the weekly protests against the Archer project were promoted by Juan Rangel, who was a political ally of yours.”

When Mendoza first ran for mayor in 2019, the Chicago Teacher’s Union pointed out that as a state legislator, she voted for a $98 million subsidy for the UNO charter schools network, of which Rangel was CEO. Mendoza lauded UNO’s work in her district, supporting the largest taxpayer grant for a charter network in Illinois at the time. After the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Rangel with fiscal wrongdoing, he resigned and paid a $10,000 fine.

Rangel currently leads the pro-charter school lobbying group Urban Center, which publicized the “Archer Guardians” protests in or near project supporter Ald. Julia Ramirez’s (12th) office, starting last December. Ramirez’s aldermanic challenger Claudia Zuno was a regular rally attendee before she announced her candidacy in February. In May, Rangel told the Tribune that he had talked to Zuno, a family friend, about running against Ramirez long before he promoted the Archer demonstration. That basically confirmed that the six months of protests were a political strategy.

Back in August, I wrote, “So that provides a clue on where Mendoza might have gotten the idea to disparage the Archer protected bike lanes on WBEZ.”

At today’s press conference, I asked Mendoza if her previous support for Rangel’s charter school network had something to do with her calling the Archer project a ‘debacle.'”

“No,” she answered. “I had never even spoken to Juan Rangel about this issue. So, number one, people shouldn’t lob allegations that they have zero evidence to be true. So, no, I don’t ask people for permission on having an opinion on issues that I feel strongly about, and I definitely won’t as mayor.”

“What you need to know is that I do care about rider safety. I myself am a cyclist. My husband is a cyclist. Our little boy is going to be a cyclist. And I almost got plowed down by John “Quarters” Boyle [a convicted “Hired Truck Scandal” felon] on my bike and chased that guy down.”

“I love that story,” I said.

Video Mendoza shot of Boyle fleeing a crash scene, via Block Club Chicago.

“So trust me, I want rider safety as well,” Mendoza continued. “But, again, I don’t take my marching orders from anybody. Let me correct that. The only person who tells me what to do is my 91-year-old mother. And she’s going to tell me to do whatever I need to do to lead this city.”

“So I think that there’s a lot of strong emotions on both sides of this argument or this debate,” Mendoza added. “I have an open mind. But I also think that the groups with very strong, intractable beliefs have to also have a little bit of an open mind and find some common ground where we can work on these projects together.”

“So I used a word,” she said. “Don’t hang me over it. It was a debacle to those people who told me that language. They think it was an absolute debacle. I articulated that in an interview. And in the same way also heard people when they said, ‘Hey, don’t call it a debacle. In fact, somebody reached out to me about it on an email and I walked them through my reasoning and I said, ‘Probably a bad choice of words, but for the people who saw their business traffic come down, what do you say to them?'”

“Now, there was also a sewer and water main project there that caused a lot of the congestion and took away parking,” I noted.

The utility project on Archer in Brighton Park eliminated parking and turn lanes, and narrowed the mixed-traffic lanes, for several months. Photo: John Greenfield

“Sure, now there’s traffic,” Mendoza responded. “I have to deal with traffic every day coming from the North Side to my job at the comptroller’s office [at 161 North Clark St.] And that is just like the fifth season in Chicago. There’s always going to be traffic because of water main improvements, or the Kennedy’s getting redone, or we’re filling potholes. That’s different than the arguments that were made very clear to me, again, not by Mr. Rangel, but by the people who live or work in that community. And, again, it’s a community that I have a lot of experience in because I used to represent it.”

I appreciate Susana Mendoza taking the time to thoroughly answer my question, and perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt that she was being transparent here. But assuming it’s true that the traffic safety project she disparaged on WBEZ just happens to be the same one being used as a political wedge issue, by the man she helped win a $98 million grant, that’s quite a coincidence.

On a related note, this weekend, Gage Park Cyclists, which helped organize the rallies in support of the Archer project, and the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, are holding Dia de los Muertos-themed rides to honor traffic crash victims.

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