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Two years ago, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin quietly co-founded a consulting firm with a top city aide, who’s also a lifelong friend, and two men from Virginia.

The arrangement has raised several potential conflict of interest issues for Irvin: There’s a mayor going into business with a city employee who is so close to Irvin that the mayor calls him a stepbrother. There’s the employee skirting through a process requiring city approval for side jobs. And there’s the two Virginia men, who went on to get a $15,000 city contract without their ties to Irvin being disclosed.

As Irvin seeks to become Illinois’ next governor while running for the GOP nomination on June 28, the episode joins other previously disclosed arrangements in raising questions about where Irvin draws the line between public duties and private ventures.

Irvin has blanketed the airwaves portraying himself as a relative outsider who would clean up a state government but he has come under increased scrutiny especially over the five years he has run Illinois’ second-largest city.

That scrutiny now includes questions about the consulting firm Aurora Dynamic Solutions, based two blocks from City Hall. Irvin owns it with Michael Pegues, who Irvin hired right after being elected mayor in 2017 to be Aurora’s chief information officer. While the two are not related by blood, Irvin considers Pegues a stepbrother because Irvin’s biological father — who did not raise Irvin — at times raised Pegues, and Irvin has said he and Pegues have been close since childhood.

Irvin never announced his ownership in Aurora Dynamic Solutions, and it isn’t disclosed on the state ethics form he filed when he ran for governor. As of Tuesday, the consulting firm had a half-finished website that’s designed to be hard to Google but — if someone could find it — advertised a wide swath of services, including government consulting.

For its first seven months of existence, the firm also was co-owned by Ranapratap Chegu and Gyanchander Gongireddy, two Virginia men who run a consulting firm in suburban Washington, D.C. At that same time, the city gave the pair’s Virginia firm a $150-per-hour consulting contract to help the Irvin administration work with COVID-19 data, according to Aurora city records.

Irvin’s campaign said the mayor’s firm was started in 2020 basically as a fallback career if Irvin, a defense attorney by trade, lost his 2021 mayoral reelection bid. Irvin, of course, didn’t lose that race. So, his campaign said, the firm has just sat there, with zero clients or income, for nearly two years.

“Mayor Irvin never intended and does not intend to commence any business operations through Aurora Dynamic Solutions until after he is out of public office,” campaign spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis said.

As for why the administration inked a deal with the mayor’s former Virginia business partners, a spokesman for Irvin’s Aurora administration said the contract followed normal city rules.

Still, political experts said the episode raises questions: Why would a sitting mayor start a business with Pegues, a city employee he’s supposed to be supervising? And how did two of their business partners end up getting city work?

While he saw no “egregious” ethical violations, Kent Redfield, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said that “there is a casual mixing of the public and private interests and a lack of concern over transparency which is all too common in politics as usual in Illinois.”