Dear North Aurora Community,

What a year 2023 has been for our town and that is thanks to you, our North Aurora residents, business owners, and all who pass through and visit us, along with our fantastic Village staff and my fellow Village Board members.

We were busy last year and we’re looking to be even busier in 2024 as we work hard to create a sense of community, improve our town and make North Aurora a place you’re proud of to call home. There’s so many things that happened last year, but I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few that really shone.

One of the items the Village Board discussed was a desire to bring more community events to North Aurora and we were so excited to share so many new and old favorites with our residents last year. We hosted our first ever Cuisine at the Crossroads and heard (and tasted!) so many sweet and delicious things about it that we’re aiming to do two for 2024! We expanded on our new holiday event Making Spirits Bright and were delighted to have reindeer for our residents to take photos with and pet. Which, speaking of, our annual North Aurora Days event had so many awesome attractions including an actual live sloth named Stella to pet, inflatable climbing walls, and of course excellent music to listen to with so many great people. We can’t wait for what’s to come for this year!

I am also proud and honored to announce that the Village of North Aurora has designed a set of challenge coins. One set is to honor Veterans in our community and I had the privilege of presenting those coins at our Veterans Day ceremony to our veterans in attendance and personally thanking them for their service. There is a second challenge coin as well that was created to be given to members of our community who go above and beyond in efforts to make North Aurora a more beautiful and awesome place and I look forward to handing out these very special coins to very special people over the coming years.

As always, the Village strives to improve the quality of life for our residents by maintaining and updating our infrastructure. Our annual road program saw 2.8 miles of road completely resurfaced and maintained and we saw several projects involving sewers and water mains completed. We launched our lead service line inventory program and will be working with affected homes in the coming year to safely replace those lead lines.

And we’d be remiss not to mention the influx of growth happening in our town. We’ve had a number of restaurants and businesses open along the Orchard Road Corridor – including Starbucks and Taco Bell — along with a new luxury apartment complex just down the way. We have seen vacant buildings in several of our retail fronts find new owners to occupy them – like Krema Coffee —  and Village staff is working to keep that momentum going alongside further new construction like the Casey’s Gas Station.  We are delighted by how many business owners themselves live in North Aurora and chose to open their own businesses here and to see so much community spirit and desire to make our town even more awesome.

We are looking forward to what the future holds for North Aurora and we hope you’ll join us for an exciting adventure.

Thanks for a great 2023, North Aurora! Let’s make it an even more amazing 2024!

Sincerely,

Mayor Mark Gaffino