For three years Rey Colon had been one of the YMCA’s rising executive stars. He was widely praised for, among other things, overseeing the construction of the Y’s new branch in Logan Square. Then on August 16 the Y abruptly fired him.
By almost all accounts, the aldermanic campaign of 1995 was mean and nasty, even by Chicago standards. And like all great ward fights, it continued after the election was over. In her first few months in office Colom made it clear that she relished a good fight, frequently telling rooms filled with voters exactly what they didn’t want to hear. When, for instance, a group of local residents asked her to support their proposal to convert the Unity play lot, at Drummond and Kimball, into a basketball court, she said no. When the residents pointed out that they’d been working on the plan with the Park District for over a year and had the support of almost all the local social service agencies, she still said no, claiming to represent a “silent majority” of opposition. “I know these people [who support the basketball courts],” Colom said at the time. “They’re the ones who didn’t support me in the last election. They just want to use this [basketball] court to keep that fight going.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
While he worked his way through Columbia College, he took a job as a youth worker at the local Boys & Girls Club, and eventually became its executive director. In 1994 the Park District hired him to “work with communities throughout the north and northwest sides. I worked with the residents on Unity. That’s where the lines were drawn between me and Vilma. It was more than the courts. It was the way she treated people. People put in hours of planning–then Vilma crushed it. You don’t treat people like that.”
Everyone except Colon, who was left to fight Colom on his own. “You know Chicago politics–everybody’s making deals,” he says. A few months after the election, “the Park District let me go. It was a general shake-up–it had nothing to do with the election. I have to give the Park District credit. I heard that Vilma called them to get them to put pressure on me to drop out, but they didn’t budge. I took a leave of absence, and they let me stay in the race.”
Colon says that while he was running the Logan Square Y he temporarily made peace with Colom: “I wasn’t going to let our rivalry get in the way of the job, so yes, I called on her for funding support. I met with her. I even had a beer with her once. But I never gave up my dream of being alderman. I never thought she was right for the ward.”
Colom says she felt betrayed by Colon’s letter. She thought they’d achieved a permanent peace, like the one she’d achieved with Gutierrez. After all, they’d worked together to raise money for the new Y. “I couldn’t understand why he would write what he did,” she says.
In short, Colon says, he was told he would have to resign if he ran. And if he resigned, he’d have to sign a confidentiality agreement promising to keep all the details of his departure secret. “They said they were going to make me a generous offer. They would pay me one pay period for each year of service. Since I was there three years, I’d get three pay periods. I was pretty surprised. I didn’t see it coming. I never expected they’d go back on their word about letting me run. I still don’t see the conflict. I’m not the first person out of a social service agency to run for office. It happens all the time. I said, ‘But what about what you told me?’ Cole said, ‘I was naive back then.’ He said that it would look as though the Y supported my campaign. I said, ‘No, it would only look as though they supported my right to run for office.’ They told me to think about it.”
