After months of delay, a key empowerment zone panel voted Thursday to fund a job-training program that a powerful empowerment zone official had vilified in a racially charged battle.
The 5-2 vote to recommend nearly $1 million in funding for the Greater West Town Community Development Project vindicated a program that received strong reviews from city officials as well as the vocal opposition of Paul Ramey, chairman of the empowerment zone’s policy and planning committee.
The debate went beyond Greater West Town’s request for $947,240 over two years.
It underscored how difficult it has been for the job-creation program, the centerpiece of President Clinton’s urban agenda, to overcome years of mistrust cutting across the communities that make up the empowerment zone.
Chicago was among the six urban areas designated federal empowerment zones in December 1994 in an effort to pump life back into some of America’s most distressed inner-city neighborhoods. Chicago’s zone is made up of three clusters covering Pilsen/Little Village and parts of the South and West Sides.
At issue in Greater West Town’s case was its request for grant money to expand its program to train low-income residents in woodworking and shipping/receiving jobs.
The proposal will be considered among others at the next meeting of the full empowerment zone coordinating council, on July 2.
The fight over Greater West Town has been so sensitive that Thursday morning’s meeting started an hour late because it took that long just to get a quorum of committee members together, so any votes would be valid.
Earlier this spring, Ramey pushed through a vote to give the proposal a No. 3 ranking out of 4, even though only four of 13 committee members were present.
Before Thursday’s vote returning the proposal to a No. 1 ranking, city staff members reiterated the letters of support Greater West Town had received from West Side groups and Ald. Walter Burnett (27th).
Ramey contends the group does not have sufficient community support and works with employers who refuse to hire low-income blacks, especially from the Chicago Housing Authority’s Henry Horner Homes.
“We don’t support racist businesses,” Greater West Town Executive Director Bill Leavy told the committee as several minority trainees from the agency’s programs sat around him. “It’s not just racism (of employers). It’s a deficit of vocational skills” of some residents.
But “those things we can work on,” Leavy added, “and successfully bridge the gap.”
Ramey, however, continued to criticize the program and the businesses it works with, some of which started on the West Side before CHA projects such as Henry Horner were built.
“How have these industries demonstrated good faith with people who were not always poor, were not always unskilled?” Ramey asked, contending that those firms “still have an unwillingness to hire from that community.”
Ramey has made such allegations before; the difference this time was that a sufficient number of his committee colleagues stood up for Greater West Town.
