SPRINGFIELD – Sean VanGordon took a look back on 2025 and discussed his accomplishments as mayor, as well as some challenging aspects of the year. He highlighted the Fiscal Stability Task Force, the completion of Mill Street, and Flock Cameras.
“If we rewound to basically the summer of ’24, the Fiscal Stability Task Force began out of a conversation with the city manager and myself, just about headwinds related to the budget,” VanGordon said. From there, a community group of members was gathered and asked for advice from other community members around revenue, cuts, and legislative and economic development fixes.
“We spent all summer going out to the public and talking about it,” he said. “This has probably been one of the hardest conversations we’ve had. This problem’s been 30 years in the making. This summer was about giving the public all the information, letting them ask questions, offering my perspective, and just giving them a chance to make up their mind. What do they think we should do? So whatever the fiscal challenge that we had was, we did it together.”
A project that VanGordon was most proud of facilitating this year was the completion of the Mill Street construction. Conversations about the project were held with the community starting in 2017, and it was the predecessor to the first street bond. However, the COVID-19 pandemic put plans on pause.
“It took after I became mayor, really going back and being diligent between how we prioritize transportation funding, funding on a city level, and how we went out and engaged with our partners to find additional funding. We could not have finished it without support from people like John Lively or Congresswoman Hoyle to make sure that we had gotten the dollars in to complete that as a project.”
It looks good right now. The public is super thrilled with it, and frankly, I am really grateful for the patience of the people who live on that street, because that street was torn up for 18 months. That was exactly the length of time we told them it was going to take, but it’s still hard.”
The mayor noted that the installation of Flock cameras, which came from the funding of a state grant, was originally used for retail theft, an economic competitiveness issue.
“As people have worked down that path, you really didn’t see all these other potential issues coming forward,” VanGordon said.
He said the council slowed down to talk with the community about the issue, since so many concerns were arising.
“We kind of took it slow through some of this to try to really understand what groups of people were telling us about, how to sort of move forward as a community, because nobody’s an expert on all things all the time. But in 2025, really listening to people to make sure that we hear and understand their concerns, asking those questions to validate them, and then potentially changing directions or figuring out how to go forward as a community, that’s usually the best way to handle those sorts of tough political conversations.”
Looking ahead, “We’re facing a lot of economic headwinds right now, but I think the thing I wish for the community is that it just feels a little bit easier,” VanGordon said. “What I wish for people would be that it just feels a little bit easier, like the economy just feels like it’s got a tailwind instead of a headwind to it. When I think about my particular work going into the next year, I want us to feel like we’re moving ahead on, stabilizing our fiscal situation,” he said.
