Cook County Board President John Stroger’s $3 billion budget proposal has stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy. His proposed increase in the sales tax and call for a new lease tax properly have been criticized as poorly timed and purely anti-business.
At a time when private companies across the metropolitan region are downsizing and “right-sizing” their organizations by making tough-minded reductions-in-force and layoffs, Cook County continues to rely on tax increases to prop up its bloated and wasteful bureaucracy.
But as serious as the current budget crisis appears, it is only a symptom of the chronic disease that afflicts county government.
The real problems are more structural than fiscal. A comprehensive report entitled “Reinventing Cook County,” spearheaded by Cook County Commissioner Michael Quigley, with guidance from a panel of seven distinguished professors from the University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul, Loyola and the University of Illinois at Chicago, presents a sensible plan for eliminating duplication and waste and making the county system simpler and more accountable to citizens.
The report deserves serious consideration by the Cook County Board because it represents a good start toward a re-examination of our unwieldy and oppressive governmental infrastructure at the county level.
But infrastructure problems also extend beyond Cook County. Illinois has more local government units than any state in the nation. The six-county Chicago metropolitan area contains 1,200 local taxing districts. Half of those are in Cook County. Chicago residents routinely receive real estate bills containing a whopping 11 line items representing separate taxes imposed by the Chicago Park District, the Forest Preserve District and the library, to name a few, in addition to the city, county and public school system.
Moreover, our local economy is dominated by public-sector employment. The two largest employers in the Chicago metropolitan area are the federal government and Chicago public schools. Four of the six largest employers are also governmental–Jewel-Osco and Advocate Health Care are the only private employers among the six largest in Chicagoland. In all, government employs 216,590 workers in our metropolitan area, almost 94,447 more than the combined total of all employees working at private companies (Jewel-Osco, Advocate Health Care, SBC, UPS and Walgreens) ranked in the Top 10.
To experienced observers, these statistics will come as no surprise. They simply reflect a disturbing national pattern. As early as 1992, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the 18.2 million employees then working for federal, state and local governments (excluding the military) surpassed the level of all manufacturing jobs in our country for the first time. Today, government employment stands at 21.4 million jobs and the gap between government employment and private sector employment continues to widen.
All of us have family members or friends in the private sector who have been victimized by the harsh realities of employment in a global economy: layoffs, reductions-in-force, corporate reorganizations and consolidations that yield slashed overhead and expenses. Meanwhile, in the public sector, basic principles of government push in the opposite direction. Government gets bigger. Taxes skyrocket. New programs are developed. Government services become less efficient. A fat and wasteful government gets fatter and less efficient. Return on the investment of our tax dollars is discouragingly smaller with every passing day.
So what’s the solution to this seemingly intractable situation? How do we extricate ourselves from this inefficient tangle of multiple taxation and political turf protection? How do we avoid the scandalous waste of a phalanx of bodyguards (valets?) for scores of public officials who don’t need them, or of multiple and redundant mosquito abatement districts and animal control agencies?
Certainly, there are no easy answers. The thoughtful blueprint for change in the Quigley report represents a good start. The word “reform” is rarely even whispered in Cook County. But the report is a clarion call for fundamental change in the cumbersome, entrenched Cook County bureaucracy.
Some of the report’s suggestions are quite simple: merging the offices of county clerk and recorder of deeds; consolidating the assessors’ and the treasurers’ offices; and transferring responsibility for municipal-level services (police, highways, etc.) in unincorporated areas to adjacent municipalities.
Other ideas in the report are more complex and politically sensitive: separating the presidency of Cook County from board membership to establish a true separation of powers; reducing the board majority for override of a presidential veto from four-fifths to three-fifths; and creating one countywide Board of Elections.
To be sure, the problems with our governmental infrastructure extend well beyond Cook County. But “reinventing Cook County” would be a great first step in a reform movement that could save beleaguered taxpayers millions.
