In 1993, the men who are now the leading Democratic candidates in the March 19 primary for the 12th District seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners got new jobs.
Both turned out to be big stories.
Forrest Claypool, a political consultant and former chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley, became general superintendent of the Chicago Park District.
The idea: That the young lawyer would clean house; deflate the bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy.
It worked: From 1993 to 1998 Claypool cut the payroll from roughly 4,100 employees to 3,300, stopped work on hundreds of make-work construction projects, and handed great measures of responsibility and accountability back to the individual parks.
Without asking for a tax increase, he planted a record number of trees, tripled the flower gardens and added more than 100 green acres to the parks. He privatized the harbors and golf courses, restored numerous softball diamonds and swimming pools, and allocated funds for 100 full-time Chicago police officers to patrol the parks.
He even added such grace notes as donating the Park District skybox at Soldier Field to charity and getting rid of his tax-paid chauffeur.
Also in 1993, Ted Lechowicz, the 12th District incumbent and former state legislator, took a side job for then-Secretary of State George Ryan. He lobbied for the renewal of auto insurance legislation.
The idea: That the old warhorse would clean up; inflate his already bloated state pension.
It worked: Ryan paid Lechowicz $9,000 for six weeks’ work, but the real benefit has been roughly an extra $20,000 a year, every year, in Lechowicz’s pension check.
The make-work assignment (the insurance legislation was never in trouble and passed unanimously) was designed to allow Lechowicz to pad his pension by taking a brief job at unusually high pay, as the state formula then allowed. It gave him an instant 45 percent raise, to $61,200 a year, and the bonus increases annually.
For this now-prohibited trick, Lechowicz earned a Pig at the Trough Award from Chicago magazine and became the archetype for oily, out-of-touch insiders who clog our system, misuse our money and call it public service.
Lechowicz has since cemented that status by consistently playing anti-reformer on the County Board. There, he has dutifully carried water for the leaders of the “fat, featherbedded” county bureaucracy, as a Tribune editorial put it last March. The editorial described county government today as “a place to award insider deals, hire relatives by the arkload and stash thousands of patronage workers.”
Lechowicz, for his part, recently orchestrated a 39 percent pay raise for county commissioners that will kick in next year. And while it’s true that commissioners haven’t had a raise in seven years, it’s also true that $85,000 is an awfully fluffy salary for a part-time job, especially if and when Lechowicz adds it to an annual state pension that now tops $70,000.
In 1993, Daley appointed Claypool to roust Lechowiczian fixtures from the Chicago Park District and to reflect credit and honor upon the mayor. And though Claypool made a few mistakes–I’m still annoyed at him for failing to try to restore the name of Waveland Golf Course–he was, overall, a key factor in creating Daley’s early image as a reformer.
Now in 2002, Daley is backing Lechowicz over Claypool in the primary. He and his brother John, who heads the board’s Finance Committee, are lending their clout to the effort to crush the man who just might be able to use his energy and public relations skills to change the culture of the cozy and corpulent board.
I would say I’m shocked, but would you believe me?
After Daley turned his back recently on another excellent primary candidate who once served as his chief of staff–John Schmidt, the former No. 2 man in the U.S. Department of Justice and now a candidate for Illinois attorney general–and endorsed the lightly qualified daughter of Illinois House leader Michael Madigan, could any of us really be surprised by the depths of his cynical calculations?
If the voters wise up and reject this nonsense … then I’ll be shocked.
