Chicago’s aldermen took to the softball field recently against the City Hall press corps, and they needed only a few innings to totally humiliate us. The aldermen clobbered the ball at the plate, and they rarely allowed us more than three at-bats per inning. The final score?
14-5.
On the softball field, at least, Chicago’s aldermen are animals.
I couldn’t help but wonder, during the two-hour shellacking, why their competitive fire on the ballfield never translates onto the floor of the City Council. During the last decade, and particularly in the last five years, Chicago’s aldermen have established themselves as world-class patsies.
They rarely challenge anything, especially when it’s a piece of legislation introduced by Mayor Richard Daley.
The state of democracy at City Hall has gotten so bad that there is rarely much debate, let alone nay votes, at City Council meetings, which 20 years ago were near-riotous affairs. These days, in the rare instances when there is a controversy on the council floor, it usually involves something inconsequential.
For instance, the most contentious vote in the last 2 1/2 years didn’t involve the city budget, minority hiring, or funding for a revamped Soldier Field. Rather, it was whether to designate a Michigan Avenue corner “Hugh Hefner Way” after Playboy’s founder.
Now there’s an issue that affects a lot of Chicago residents.
Dick Simpson, a former alderman who is now a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently studied the voting patterns among Chicago City Councils from 1863 to the present and found, not surprisingly, that the current group of aldermen fits squarely in the “rubber-stamp” category.
In reviewing the council’s votes from January 2000 until March 2002, Simpson determined that “Daley has not come close to losing any council vote in the last 27 months.”
There were only 15 instances when an alderman cast a dissenting vote during the 27 months that Simpson studied, though the council voted on thousands of agenda items. Of those 15, Simpson determined that only three had any broad significance: a resolution supporting reparations to African-Americans for slavery and discrimination; the Soldier Field reconstruction; and the ward remap. All three passed with comfortable margins.
“Although we expected the reapportionment of the wards to generate controversy in the city council, it did not happen,” Simpson wrote. “The three ward remap votes were as one-sided as most of the mayor’s victories in the city council. … In the end, only one alderman opposed the mayor’s position on the remap.”
Simpson said the squabble over naming a street corner after Hugh Hefner “lacks the substance that should generate dissension on the city council.”
Smooth sailing for budget
“In contrast, the budget has generated no dissension,” Simpson wrote. “The council has unanimously passed the mayor’s $4.6 billion budget each of the last two years.”
Chicago aldermen will tell you that their record as voting wimps is easily explained. Most of the serious debate takes place in council committees, they will say, so disputes are ironed out before they hit the council floor.
Or they will say that Daley has done such a terrific job as mayor that there is little reason to vote against him.
Sure Daley has made some good decisions during his 13 years in office. But he has also made some questionable moves that should have been stopped–or at least challenged–by the City Council.
For instance, the council rolled over for Daley when his administration sought additional money for Millennium Park, an ill-conceived project that has turned into a financial boondoggle. The aldermen didn’t question the financing for a renovated Soldier Field, a dubious $432 million investment that ranks as one of the largest public contributions for a sports facility in history.
Family ties
Worse yet, aldermen haven’t publicly challenged Daley for the recurrent ethical lapses that have plagued his administration. Isn’t anyone on the City Council bothered by the fact that one of Daley’s brothers sells insurance to city vendors and another is a partner in a law firm, Daley & George, that represents major developers on city zoning matters?
Of course, this isn’t the first time that Chicago’s City Council has been beholden to the mayor. The late Mayor Richard J. Daley held sway over a rubber-stamp council that was a crucial component of his legendary Democratic machine.
Since being elected in 1989, the current Mayor Daley has used his considerable political skill to slowly neuter the City Council and re-create a new version of the Democratic machine that is nearly as potent as his father’s.
The mayor has been helped considerably by the ineptitude of some of the aldermen, a steady stream of whom have been convicted for accepting petty bribes or who resigned for some other ethical lapse. That has allowed Daley to handpick their successors. Of the 50 members of the City Council, Daley appointed 18 of them to fill vacancies left by other aldermen.
Election help
Even some of those who weren’t appointed by Daley are now dependent at election time for help in raising money and providing campaign workers.
Daley was also aided by an unprecedented era of prosperity in the 1990s that has allowed him to keep aldermen happy by spreading money through the neighborhoods by repaving streets, rebuilding schools and replacing libraries and police stations. The flow of money into the neighborhoods has effectively muzzled former critics such as Ald. Dorothy Tillman (3rd) and Ald. Joe Moore (49th), both of whom benefited from major projects in their wards that were partly funded by the city.
Bills coming due
But now, the prosperity of the 1990s has ended, and the bills for Daley’s years of spending on high-priced consultants, wrought-iron fences and graffiti-blasting trucks are piling up. Hundreds of city employees are being laid off, and the mayor is scrambling for ways to fill a $116 million hole in next year’s budget.
Now would be the perfect time for aldermen to ask the Daley administration some tough questions about how it has been spending taxpayers’ money and how the mayor intends to make up the shortfall.
Here’s a prediction: After Daley wins re-election by a landslide next spring, he will seek one of the largest tax increases in city history to make up the budget shortfall. (Surprise! The deficit is much larger than Daley said it was before the election.)
The City Council, given a chance to demand answers on the state of the city’s finances, will complain bitterly to each other and grumble privately to reporters about being strong-armed into passing the measure.
Then they’ll walk into the council chambers, take their assigned seats and dutifully cast a “yea” vote.
