William McCarty filed his candidate petitions Monday to join the Springfield mayoral race, the last day of the municipal filing period. He’ll face incumbent Mayor Misty Buscher and former alderperson Gail Simpson in the April 6 election.
McCarty, 51, said he has received a steady flow of calls from people encouraging him to run for mayor.
“And the bottom line is these folks came to me because they believe in me,” McCarty said. “They know that I am an agent of change. I’ve demonstrated that before.”
McCarty isn’t new to electoral politics, having run for several city and county roles. He also served as the city of Springfield’s director of the Office of Budget and Management under two different mayoral administrations and said he is concerned about the direction the city is headed.
“We see a lack of progress in the last three or four years. We see a city that’s going in the wrong direction,” McCarty told Illinois Times. “We feel Springfield needs a fresh start, and part of that is bringing in an updated council and some new blood. But at the end of the day, to be fully impactful, to be fully effective, we need new leadership at the top of the ticket in Springfield.”
McCarty is a frequent critic of Mayor Misty Buscher’s management of city finances. He said the latest budget passed with a $24 million structural deficit.
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“It shows an alarming degree of fiscal irresponsibility that her budget holes get bigger and bigger each and every year” he said. “It shows an alarming degree of ambivalence, quite frankly, to something that is critically important to the city and to its citizens.”
McCarty is currently the chief financial officer for the Illinois Board of Higher Education. Prior to that, he served as chief operating officer for Illinois Department of Central Management Services.
He previously served as a village trustee and village president of Williamsville from 2005-2009 before moving to Springfield.
At age 35, McCarty was one of seven candidates who entered the Springfield mayor’s race in 2011. After not making it past the primary, he and another former mayoral candidate, Mike Farmer, both endorsed J. Michael Houston, who went on to win the election. Houston then appointed McCarty as director of the Office of Budget and Management, a role he continued under Mayor Jim Langfelder’s administration.
In 2018, McCarty ran for Sangamon County Treasurer as a Republican and lost in the primary to Joe Aiello, who received 57% of the votes.
McCarty ran for city treasurer in 2023 in a three-way race with Colleen Redpath Feger, who won the election with 45.8 percent of the vote. McCarty and the other candidate, Lisa Badger, garnered 29% and 25% respectively.
A graduate of Lincoln Land Community College, McCarty earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Notre Dame. He holds a master’s in public administration from University of Illinois at Springfield.
He and his wife, Penny, have a son attending Lincoln Land Community College and a daughter who is a student at Rochester High School.
How can his daughter be attending Rochester HS if he lives in Springfield?
City of Springfield has different school districts. He obviously is in the Rochester school district. McCarty will be a great candidate and hopefully he will be successful. We need to move Springfield in the right direction!
He fiiiiiiine…