Mayor Irvin’s Campaign Donations Linked To Another City Contract
In 2020, as the City of Aurora was finalizing the details of its new youth STEAM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Art, and Math) program, Mayor Irvin received donations from the program’s contractor, TinkRWorks.
Another donation from TinkRWorks is received after Mayor Irvin’s re-election in 2021, two weeks before the company submitted an application for COVID relief funding from the City of Aurora
A city staff member and two Aldermen sit on the board of TinkRWorks’ program partner, APS Training Academy
After being elected in 2017, Mayor Irvin brought his step-brother, Michael Pegues, from Wall St. back to Aurora to be the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the City of Aurora. Soon after his arrival, Mr. Pegues began marketing and selling Mayor Irvin and the rest of the city council on the idea of turning Aurora into a “Smart City”. A vision that paves the way for a technological dystopia which allows the city to broaden its police state by covering Aurora in cameras, facial recognition software, and other surveillance tech as well as collecting and analyzing the data of Aurora citizens and visitors, in the name of free wi-fi and better traffic.
As part of Pegues’ vision to make Aurora a “Smart City”, he wanted to start a program for underserved youth in the city to learn coding and tech from an early age to train the next generation for the new tech jobs Pegeus and the City of Aurora want to bring in.
(Nevermind whether those kids will still be able to live in Aurora with the gentrification, lack of affordable housing, and rising property taxes that is causing poor and working class residents to be pushed out from the city, but I digress.)
Instead of working with the SciTech Museum in Downtown Aurora, an already established STEM museum that was an Aurora staple from 1991 until its recent closure in 2022, Mr. Pegues instead began collaborating with a company from Elmhurst- TinkRWorks. According to the TinkRWorks’ website, the owner and CEO, Anu Mahajan, and Michael Pegues met each other through a mutual friend and began working on this program together.
As the details of the program were being discussed with the city, the TinkRWorks CEO, Mr. Mahajan, sent in a $1,000 donation to Mayor Irvin’s campaign account. This donation was received on July 27, 2020 and three months later, on October 27, 2020, his business was awarded a $100,000 contract for the pilot program with the City of Aurora. It is important to note that July 2020 was well before election season, when campaign donations are usually received.
The election season would kick off later that year and in February 2021, Mr. Mahajan donated an additional $1,000 to Mayor Irvin who went on to win his 2nd term in the April 6, 2021 election.
For some reason, two days after the election on April 8, 2021, Mayor Irvin received another contribution from TinkRWorks’ Mr. Mahajan for an additional $1,000. This happened to be two and a half weeks before the City of Aurora began accepting applications from Aurora businesses for COVID relief funding from the city. Unsurprisingly, TinkRWorks was one of the applications that the city received and despite the company being from Elmhurst, they were eventually approved for $50,000 in relief funding.
There were no donations between Mr. Mahajan and Mayor Irvin after April 2021, though TinkRWorks went on to receive another city contract for $300,000 in 2022. During that vote Alderman Ed Bugg asked city staff why they had not gone out for bids from multiple companies before awarding the contract to TinkRWorks, but ultimately the contract was approved without much fanfare.
Maybe Mr. Mahajan feels he has already entrenched himself enough that he was past the need to pay in order to play. As powerful as campaign donations to Mayor Irvin are, the relationships you build with the establishment in Aurora is also an extremely influential tool to keep your business playing in the city, and Mr. Mahajan has done this well.
TinkRWorks does their STEAM programs in partnership with APS Academy, a business owned by another major Irvin campaign donor, Harish Ananthapadmanabhan of JH Real Estate who, along with his business partner, has donated over $67,000 to Mayor Irvin and his PAC and in turn has received millions in incentives from the city for its real estate projects.
That program partner, APS Academy, has a Board of Directors full of powerful officials in Aurora including a city staff member, Mayor Irvin’s brother and Aurora CIO Michael Pegues as well as Aldermen Sherman Jenkins and Scheketa Hart-Burns who both have a lot of sway on the city council and themselves vote on these companies contracts.
Yeah… when your business is this entrenched with city leadership and other large donors, you probably don’t need to produce as many campaign contributions yourself anymore.
The "academic" material Tinrworks has online looks pretty bad. For teaching how to code, they've invented their own graphics based contraption called "TinkRcode". What they show of the system online looks like an overly complicated mess and if students are being taught this as a coding class it is a terrible travesty