Daniel Biss began his political career as a legislator, representing Evanston and other surrounding communities in Springfield first as a state representative and then as a state senator.
He’s very likely to continue his career as a legislator in Washington, D.C., as he’s poised to win the 9th Congressional District seat in next month’s midterm election and succeed his mentor, retiring U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky.
But in between these chapters, for the past five and a half years, Biss served in the very different role of Evanston mayor. Though he came into office with a long policy platform to advance, he couldn’t directly vote on it like he did in the statehouse, and he also lacked the executive and administrative powers wielded in “strong mayor” cities like Chicago and New York.
So how does being mayor fit into the story of Daniel Biss? When the RoundTable asked him, Biss gave a long pause to think it over before beginning his answer candidly.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “Let me say three different things.” He launched into a long reflection on his past and future as a lawmaker, what he learned from working in municipal government and the experiences he’ll bring with him to D.C.
Biss officially resigned at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, leaving the door open for councilmembers to pick an acting mayor next week before voters elect a new successor in a special election this coming spring. His resignation came a little more than two weeks before he faces Republican John Elleson in the congressional election on Nov. 3, a race Biss is widely expected to win.
The now-former mayor sat with the RoundTable for an exit interview last week, in between his final City Council meeting and a few days out from his full exit. He talked about how he approached the job as a legislator, the learning curve he faced, the policies and votes that defined his tenure and what lies ahead for the city as he leaves.
A legislator in the mayor’s seat
Of the three things Biss said about how his time as mayor fits into his story, two came back to his future in Washington.
For one, seeing “where the rubber meets the road” for cities implementing federal policy, like funding for housing programs, will be an “extraordinarily beneficial education” for his future work, he said.
The third thing he mentioned was that his first run for mayor in 2021 stemmed directly from a desire to work on major policy issues locally, namely racial inequities in policing and housing affordability. Getting ground-level experience on those topics in Evanston will be “very helpful context” at the federal level, he said.
But his second comment was his “super direct” answer to the question of where mayor fits into his portrait. He said he’s learned he wasn’t the most natural fit for an executive seat — or, as he put it, “in my heart, I’m a legislator.”
“I think it’s the role that best matches my strengths and weaknesses, and passions, and I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to learn it’s going to be the right fit for me to do the most for this community, just based on what I’m good at and less good at,” he said. “I might have suspected that before, but I feel like I know that now.”
When he took over as mayor in 2021, Biss found himself in “a totally different job.” It was “consistently surprising” how different City Council operated from Springfield, he said. And even more surprising was his realization that the state legislature operated “better than the City Council” in some ways, which he worked to correct in the council’s new rules instituted earlier this term.
“People think I’m such a fuddy-duddy to be like, ‘Hey, could you please write down the amendment that’s about to be the law before we pass it?’” Biss said. “There are some ways in which we actually had some stuff to learn from Springfield — which again, wouldn’t have bet on that.”
Mayor wasn’t the first executive office Biss eyed. He briefly ran for state comptroller in 2015 but dropped out before the 2016 primary, and he made a full bid for governor in 2018, losing to current Gov. JB Pritzker in the Democratic primary.
Critics have long accused Biss of treating his offices as a springboard to higher positions. A super PAC supporting one of his congressional opponents even sent mailers depicting him as a ladder-climber and blowing with the wind. Whenever asked why he ran for Congress after winning reelection as mayor, like the RoundTable posed to him in February, he’s answered the same way: both Evanston and the country are “in an emergency,” and he believes serving in Congress will let him do “the most good for this community.”
As for what he can do for Evanston in Washington that he couldn’t as mayor, Biss immediately identified one priority: protecting the city from federal immigration agents, who have taken residents into custody numerous times since President Donald Trump began his second term.
“I feel like I’ve done a lot that mattered in this town” as mayor, Biss said, “but if I could have had more of an impact in stopping Midway Blitz, that would have done more good for Evanston than anything else that I’ve done.”
Learning the ropes as a ‘weak mayor’
Biss came in with an ambitious agenda, from overhauling the zoning code to reducing carbon emissions from buildings and creating an alternative first responder team. He acknowledged it was a “very specific, long platform,” and argued it made sense given the mayor’s function as the city’s “agenda setter.”
While he did advance each of those policy goals during his tenure, his first order of business was to actually learn his powers — and lack thereof. When the RoundTable mentioned his past jokes in speeches about facing a “hell of a learning curve,” Biss laughed. “How was that a joke?” he replied.
Biss said he entered office without the City Council “fluency” of his predecessors. He noted that every past mayor in his lifetime either served as a councilmember before becoming mayor or, in Steve Hagerty’s case, at least had more experience “in the municipal government mix” than he did.
A large part of that learning curve came from Evanston’s “council-manager” system, where the mayor and councilmembers appoint a city manager to oversee the city’s day-to-day operations and make hiring decisions on all other staff. Under the “strong mayor” system in some bigger cities, the mayor and their administration run city government directly.
Biss said he grappled with a gap between what he and residents expected he could do “with the stroke of a pen” and what he could actually do as a weak mayor. He said his inbox was always full of requests that would be “unethical” for him to pursue, ranging from intervening in traffic tickets to changing inspection practices.
“If you called Brandon Johnson and asked him to fix your parking ticket, that’s also unethical,” Biss said. “But if you called Brandon Johnson and said, ‘You know, the way the department that does inspections of backyard fences is approaching their job seems not right, can we change the policy?’ Brandon could just do that. But I can’t and shouldn’t.”
As a result, Biss said he looked for less direct ways to “exert influence,” advocating for changes without directly ordering them. He attended the weekly meeting between City Manager Luke Stowe and senior staff, which past mayors had not, to be more “engaged in the functioning of government.”
But the city manager position also represents Biss’ biggest regret as mayor. Shortly after he took office, City Manager Erika Storlie resigned in the wake of the lifeguard program’s sexual abuse scandal. Over the next year, Biss and councilmembers went through three failed searches for a replacement, during which the interim manager also departed. They ultimately appointed Stowe to the position in August 2022.
“The first year of city manager search turmoil was a mess for the city … and I definitely take responsibility as, certainly, someone who should have done better,” Biss said. “Had I understood then what I understand now, I would have done a much better job of leading the city through that process, and I think it would have mattered.”
Asked if he feels he’s leaving the city in a better position than he found it in, Biss said he does, noting that the pandemic makes a direct comparison difficult, though. He named lower turnover among senior staff, improved morale in the police department and calming the “chaos” and “intense anger” of early council meetings as examples of progress.
Leaving behind big projects — and the big stadium vote
Learning his role as he went, Biss still moved to advance his policy agenda throughout his term. He wrote in his own farewell letter that the city has “embarked on major reforms that will take years to fully implement,” describing Evanston as wanting to be both a “national policy laboratory and a conventional suburb.”
Several reforms were his own initiatives: the CARE Team has launched as a non-police emergency response unit, the Healthy Buildings Ordinance requires large buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and councilmembers recently adopted a strategic housing plan for the next 20 years.
Although these initiatives are off the ground, they still face serious obstacles. Biss is leaving as the city grapples with a budget deficit that staff project will exhaust excess reserves by the end of next year, and several councilmembers have pushed for cutting staff to close it.
Biss said he believes his signature policies will be able to stand on their own without him, but noted that none of the candidates for next year’s special mayoral election have “100-point policy plans.”
“We’re in the middle of major projects, and just getting them right is going to take a lot of the city’s bandwidth,” he said.
Envision Evanston 2045 — the project to overhaul Evanston’s land use policies and development rules — is the biggest item Biss is leaving unfinished. The process has already been running for two and a half years, and is just now about to begin a multiyear writing of a new zoning code.
That’s a much longer timeline than Biss’ original proposal to pass a new comprehensive plan and zoning code by the April 2025 elections. He told the RoundTable in late 2024 he believed it would be “immoral” to wait longer. That schedule was soon ditched, however, first in the face of intense backlash against the Biss’ comments and later due to the original consultant being fired.
A new comprehensive plan was finally adopted in January 2026 by a 5-4 council vote, with deep divisions persisting over whether the city should allow greater density, especially by removing single-family zoning restrictions and allowing buildings of two to four units everywhere in Evanston.
Biss was in favor of this change, but said the growth of resident activist groups has helped end the perception of Envision Evanston as “Daniel’s thing,” which he called “huge progress.” “We all would have been better off” taking an extra six months to nurture that activism on all sides of the issue before any controversy broke out, he added.
But while Biss said he believes in hearing out all sides, he’s “not a believer that you need consensus,” like a unanimous council vote.
“There’s a huge difference between feeling an obligation to take everyone’s point of view in and take it seriously, versus expecting that you only move forward if everybody’s happy,” he said, “and I think it’s really important to be willing to move forward when not everybody’s happy.”
There’s perhaps no better example of that belief in action than Biss’ tie-breaking votes in November 2023 to approve the Ryan Field rebuild deal, including a zoning change to allow public concerts at the stadium. Though it wasn’t his own initiative, those votes became the most definitive single moment of Biss’ tenure, and he’s faced significant criticism in the years since from opponents who argue that concerts will disrupt the surrounding neighborhood and that the city should have secured more benefits.
Biss has stood by his votes in the years since, writing again in his farewell letter that NU’s early benefits offers “looked nothing like the final deal.” Asked if he feels he did enough to make his case to residents at the time, he said “definitely yes,” and that the proof is in his recent election performances.
He only lost two Evanston precincts — the stadium precinct and its neighbor to the west — in his 2025 mayoral reelection. In the 2026 congressional primary, he won all but the stadium precinct and five others that “were obviously young.” He argued this demonstrates the backlash against his votes wasn’t citywide.
“I believe that more people in this town support the decision than oppose it, and I think that that is because we’ve made the argument,” he said.
He acknowledged, though, that the city has “learned a lot” from how disruptive the stadium construction was, and that leadership needs to “be relentless in pushing Northwestern” to fulfill its promises.
“Our senior staff has grown increasingly comfortable just saying, ‘Listen, here’s how it’s going to be. If you want us to remove your permission to do any more construction, we’re happy to remove that. But if you don’t want that, you’ve got to meet your commitments,’” Biss said. “And I think Northwestern has come to learn they can’t mess around with that.”
The road ahead
As Biss goes to Washington, the City Council remains deeply divided. Since the start of this term, councilmembers have often fallen into 5-4 voting blocs aligned with and against Biss. The growing frequency of circular arguments, delay tactics and personal jabs across the dais have slowed meetings to a crawl and dragged some issues out for months or longer.
Biss said he doesn’t know what should be done to fix this, but that it’s possible his departure could help councilmembers “reset.” He noted that in a 2020 referendum, more than 80% of voters said they’d prefer city elections to be nonpartisan.
“The view of the community is that we shouldn’t have parties,” he said. “I think that our city government works best when we don’t have quasi-parties on the City Council — I would rather that we not.”
On the special mayoral election to pick his successor, Biss said he doesn’t know yet if he’ll make an endorsement. Six candidates have publicly declared their intent to run so far, and the filing period to get on the ballot is Oct. 19 through 26.
Asked what he thinks Evanston will need from its next mayor, he pointed to the policy projects still underway, but he also alluded to a need for a culture shift.
“So much of the operational work that happened during my time as mayor was about stabilization,” Biss said. “I think now, the question is, how do you go from stability to excellence as the main focus?”
As for him, Biss said he’s spent the months since his primary win on both his own campaign and supporting other Democrats around the country, hoping for “as big a blue wave as possible” in the midterms. He’s also been preparing for his likely win and entrance to the House, meeting future colleagues and thinking about staffing for his offices on Capitol Hill and in the district.
He said he might retain some members of Schakowsky’s team, noting their work product “speaks for itself.” An ideal mix would have experience from both inside and outside Capitol Hill, rather than all of one or the other, he added.
When asked if he might bring any city staff with him, Biss replied he will “keep an open mind.” The city’s policy staff has grown during his tenure: policy manager Alison Leipsiger joined the city when Biss became mayor after working for him in the state senate, and Liza Roberson-Young filled a new legislative advisor role in July 2024 after working for the ACLU of Illinois and the state attorney general’s office.
As for his parting message to residents, Biss said it’s hard to avoid sounding “a little cliché” in describing how he feels.
“This job is fun for the exact same reason that it’s hard, which is that this community is in it,” he said. “This community is engaged, and I just feel so, so blessed to have had the chance to work with so many people on the unbelievably diverse and myriad issues that this community is passionate about.”
With a win on Nov. 3, Biss will take office as the 9th District’s representative on Sunday, Jan. 3, joining the country’s 120th Congress.
‘In my heart, I’m a legislator’: Daniel Biss reflects on time as mayor, city’s future in exit interview is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston’s most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.
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