Mayor Harold Washington`s forces made a surprise assault on Chicago`s taxicab companies Friday by moving to strip them of a decades-old privilege that one city official said granted the taxi industry ”the powers of a 51st alderman.”
The Chicago City Council`s Committee on Local Transportation Friday passed an unexpected ordinance that would usurp taxi owners` traditional rights to cross-examine witnesses at council hearings.
The action, part of the administration`s larger efforts to break monopolistic conditions in the cab business, drew loud protests from industry officials who contend that the mayor is making political jetsam of their rights in a last-ditch effort to pass his taxi legislation before the April 7 election.
”In the name of reform, the administration is cutting off all our rights . . . they are cutting off our tongues,” said Harold Hirshman, an attorney representing Checker Taxi Co. and Yellow Cab Co., the firms with the most to lose from Washington`s efforts. ”They are carrying out a pernicious agenda which should not be done in the heat of an election.”
Since at least 1963, cab license hearings were held as quasi-judicial proceedings with taxi owners enjoying the privileges of trial lawyers in presenting evidence and questioning witnesses who appeared before the city council.
But Washington`s aides, who engineered committee passage of the surprise ordinance, said the cab companies` hearing privileges are unique in Chicago`s government annals and an anachronism left over from decades of City Hall deference to the taxi industry.
”Their right to cross-examine witnesses before a committee hearing is a right that is not granted to any other (nongovernment) individual in this city or in this state,” said Michael Holewinski, Washington`s administrative assistant for public safety and regulation.
”It is really an anomaly . . . making them the only industry that had somehow written into the law that it would have a status similar to that of an elected official.”
According to Holewinski, cross-examination by taxi industry lawyers would have a ”chilling effect” on witnesses testifying in favor of breaking Checker and Yellow`s near-monopoly, since many of the witnesses are cabdrivers who now lease cabs from the city`s two largest taxi firms.
Holewinski added that the hearings, which began Thursday and are expected to include more than 100 witnesses, would be ”nonproductive, obstructionist, we`d get nothing done” if the cab companies were permitted to question each witness, as only aldermen are permitted to do in other council proceedings.
But behind many of the publicly stated explanations Friday was a mounting effort by administration officials to force a vote on Washington`s long-lingering taxi reforms before the April 7 mayoral election.
Washington, who promised cab reforms during his 1983 campaign for mayor, introduced a package of 11 taxi ordinances last June but it was not until late January that the transportation committee, which is controlled by the mayor`s allies, took up serious consideration of the measures.
While several of the ordinances already have passed the council, the most controversial and substantive measure, calling for a gradual lifting of the city`s 4,600 cab license ceiling, is still pending.
Friday`s ordinance, which will go to the full council for a vote on Wednesday, drew taxi and city officials into an animated heated debate on the council floor following the committee`s adjournment as industry attorneys accused the mayor`s aides of running roughshod over council rules in order to award Washington a campaign issue plum before April 7.
”If the old rules are bad then they were visibly bad for years,” said Hirshman, who tried unsuccessfully to gain favor from city officials by appearing before the committee Friday with a Washington campaign button on his lapel. ”We haven`t heard a word about these rules until today, in the 99th hour; you take away rights we`ve had for years.
”Mark my words. This ordinance (stripping away the monopoly) will pass exactly the way it is and just in time for the election.”
