Northbrook Trustee James Karagianis (left) with Village manager Rich Nahrstadt, may be on the way off the Northbrook Village Board after 26 years. (Irv Leavitt photo)

Bulldozers have lately been tooling around two blocks of Shermer Road on the edge of downtown Northbrook, finishing up removing most of an entire zoning district.

The unusual old district of small businesses in houses, and house — like commercial buildings, is giving way to rows of townhouses that will provide some customers for Northbrook’s compact downtown.

That downtown itself seems in flux, as the Meadow Shopping Plaza is for sale, and it wouldn’t be surprising if it were razed, partially or entirely, and then return in a more modern, mixed-use form.

The downtown progress gladdens the heart of Northbrook Trustee James Karagianis, who, earlier in his 26-year career on the Village Board, led two task forces on downtown reimagining.

“Things are really  starting to happen downtown,” Karagianis said. “I really wanted four more years to see it through.”

He may not get that chance. The Northbrook Caucus, which slates candidates for Northbrook’s Village Board, unanimously passed on Karagianis, 24-year veteran Trustee A.C. Buehler, and eight-year Trustee Bob Israel in favor of three relative newcomers to village government.

It’s the first time in the 65-year history of the candidate-slating Northbrook Caucus that three village trustees have been turned away, according to officials. It may be a harbinger of things to come in a lot of other places.

Patrick Hanley, the 29-year-old head of the 10-person subcommittee that endorsed three others, said it wasn’t because they disrespected the incumbents.

“Over many years, they’ve done a fantastic job,” he said.

But not fantastic enough to stay. Northbrook is one the most financially stable communities in the state, but, in general, local leaders who concentrate in that area don’t cover the whole playing field anymore.

“We demand more from those public leaders than perhaps we have in the past,” Hanley said.

One of the indications that the goalposts may have been shifted a bit is that two of the five questions the Northbrook candidates had to field this time involved sensitivity to diversity, and balancing business issues with “social responsibility” and the need for “diversity and inclusion … How should the Village consider and act on these values in the context of a changing community?”

Heather Ross, JoJo Hebl and Ihab Riab, if elected next spring, seem likely to be change agents on the Northbrook board, in the social realm as well as the brick-and-mortar. But they are not the tip of the spear. A faster pace of government-blessed societal change may have already begun in their town’s municipal government.

Not long ago, in 2016, Northbrook trustees shunned a mental hospital proposed for an edge-of-town site. Last year, however, they gave a much more controversial home for recovering addicts the green light to open in the middle of tony east Northbrook.

And after declining  for years to ride the north suburban gun-control bandwagon, trustees in May banned bump stocks, as well as concealed carry in establishments that serve liquor.

Trustees opted out of Cook County’s $10 minimum-wage and earned sick-leave standards in June 2017. But 16 months later, the Village Board reversed, opting back in on the sick-leave part, while, however, letting their wage law veto stand.

Change, for Northbrook, seems to come slowly, then all at once.

Some of the change may have been driven by the Northbrook Working Families Coalition, a group of ubiquitous red-shirted Northbrook Village Hall protesters against the opt-outs. The incumbents said they looked out at the Caucus’ 10-person trustee-slating subcommittee, saw three members of the coalition, and felt their chances of an endorsement in jeopardy.

“Some part of the community wants change. The very liberal left wing of this group wants us off, and they seeded the committees,” said Israel, who, until the election of Jason Han in 2017, was considered Northbrook’s most liberal trustee.

“The makeup of the new board is going to be five lawyers, and no one is over 55,” said Israel, who, like Karagianis, is an engineer. Buehler is a tech consultant.

The Caucus’ slate features Hebl, a lawyer and a one-year member of the Northbrook Plan Commission. She has sought gun control in Northbrook for years, has been a leader in elementary school parent groups and the Northbrook Women’s Club, and has served on the village’s Stormwater Management Commission.

Riad is a veteran of the Northbrook/Glenview School District 30 School Board, and a builder responsible for Northbrook’s first LEED-certified house. He served on the board of  Go-Green Northbrook, a village environmental advocacy group.

Ross, like Han, had been an employee-side labor lawyer, and now is a partner in a firm representing clients with alternative family issues, including “single persons, same sex couples and different sex couples seeking to create a family, as well as gestational surrogates, embryo donors, and gamete providers hoping to help recipients achieve the goal of parenthood.” She’s co-founder of the Chicago chapter of Jewish Coalition Against Sex Trafficking, and co-founder of Justice for Women’s Group of Glencoe-based Congregation Hakafa.

Over the years, Northbrook’s Village Board has usually been less than a third female, and almost entirely white, the latter reflecting the longtime demographic makeup of the town itself. Adding Korean-rooted, Northbrook-raised Han was not much of a step toward diversity in a town where the bilingual departments of elementary school districts are now major budget items.

Choosing the three “wasn’t a rejection of the incumbents at all,” Hanley said. “That was not the tenor of the conversation.” But new volunteer Caucus slaters arrived, as “we were really seeking out new folks to help us out,” and they represented  more diverse demographics across the committees for all offices in the town this year.

The incumbents see Working Families as the likely instigators of their failure to be endorsed.

“The three of us voted against the minimum wage. I think because of that, some minds were already made up,” Buehler said.

“Not too long ago, a lot of village residents felt that the village had the best interest of the businesses more than them, and that outcry was heard,” Riab said, referring to both the Caucus and current office holders.

Coalition leader Herb Brenner, a member of the Caucus trustee-slating subcommittee, agreed with Israel, who said that the local minimum-wage opt-in wasn’t so important anymore, but for different reasons.

Israel said that most workers in town make more than the County law’s first-stage guarantee of $10 an hour anyway, and Brenner said, “If we get a new governor, that’ll likely be taken care of” on a state-wide basis.

But people who backed the minimum wage are also likely to favor other things that have been hard to get done in Northbrook. Brenner has served as the treasurer of Open Communities, an organization that helped create affordable housing in Highland Park, Deerfield and Wilmette, but failed in Northbrook, despite approval of hundreds of new apartment units.

Ross, in preparation to run, said she met with many rank-and-file Northbrook village workers. “Most of those people can’t afford to live in Northbrook,” she said.

“I’m sure all (of a resident’s) care providers can’t afford to live in Northbrook, and a lot of good teachers can’t, either.

“I think it would serve the community well if they could.”

At 54, Riab is the oldest of the three endorsed candidates. He noted that when first elected, all the incumbents were younger, or nearly so, than all the newly slated candidates are now.

“Look at most of the up-and-coming executives in the world, and they are young people, millennials. That’s where we are right now,” he said.

“More younger people are staying in the city,” Ross said. “We need to find a way for them to decide that Northbrook is one of the places to consider. It could be the character of Northbrook” that sways them.

Israel, on the other hand, said that if the slate stands, it will actually end the Village Board’s age diversity. Village President Sandy Frum would be the only member eligible for Social Security.

Statistically, it is unlikely the slate will survive completely as-is, after the Caucus’ Nov. 4 Town Hall meeting.  If one or all of the rejected candidates fight the slate — and two of them say they’re sure they will — residents will keep voting for three candidates until three achieve a majority of those voting.

Anybody else who still wants to run is free to do so in the general election. The Caucus system is designed, in part, to prevent people from spending much money on a run.

There will also be an election at that town meeting to decide on bylaw changes. One of them would force non-endorsed candidates to get 75 percent of town meeting ballots to overcome the slate, starting in 2020.

That would make everything different. But everything seems to be getting a little different, anyway.

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