Mayor Richard Daley professed to be angered and embarrassed this week by the stench rising from the city’s Hired Truck Program.
On Monday, the U.S. attorney’s office charged the former head of the program, Angelo T. Torres, with attempted extortion. Prosecutors alleged that Torres took $3,800 to steer $50,000 in business to a trucking company. The feds also demanded all records related to the city’s $40 million Hired Truck Program, which is designed to provide trucks for city construction sites.
In a ritual that has become depressingly familiar, Daley admitted not an inkling of knowledge or responsibility for the way the truck program was run. But he sure was angry about it.
“The kinds of abuses reported recently in the Hired Truck Program are not only embarrassing, they are unacceptable,” Daley said. “My commitment is to protect Chicago’s taxpayers and maintain a government that is honest and open.” To that end, he ordered that the Hired Truck application process be abolished. Now truck owners will be subjected to higher standards and will be barred from city contracts if they have been convicted of bid rigging, extortion, syndicated gambling and other “crimes of dishonesty.”
The Daley administration professed to be appalled at Chicago Sun-Times reports that many trucks for hire were doing nothing on the city’s dime, with no-work contracts going to firms with political ties and mob ties.
The administration might be able to get away with the shock-and-anger routine regarding the apparent corruption.
Except for one problem. The administration has known at least since 1997 that the truck program was a cesspool. It promised to reform it. It appears that the administration either fell asleep, or liked the crony-filled truck program just the way it was and was content to wait until the heat died down.
It’s not as if the city wasn’t amply warned, or lacked the information it needed to run a clean truck program.
A draft report by Ernst & Young in 1998 suggested straightforward ways to make the program efficient and accountable, including electronic sensors in trucks that would make it hard to sit in one spot all day or traipse over to Wal-Mart while on the clock. The city, oddly enough, takes the position today that the Ernst & Young report should not be released to the public.
The scandal in the city’s trucking program could not come at a worse time for the Daley administration, which is attempting to bridge a budget gap by eliminating jobs and trying to impose tighter work rules.
It is not enough for the administration to, finally, try to clean up the Hired Truck Program. It needs to release the Ernst & Young report. It also needs to give a full accounting of what happened at City Hall from 1997 to this day, to explain why a scandal that was so transparently evident more than six years ago wasn’t cleaned up.
Otherwise, the revelations of the past week will leave only one conclusion: the program was working just as intended, as a corrupt patronage mill on wheels.
There was one bit of good news this week. Recognizing the laws of supply and demand, the FBI’s Chicago office announced it is forming a second public corruption unit. The existing unit certainly has been busy. There’s the indictment of former Gov. George Ryan. And the indictment of members of the politically connected Duff family on charges that they abused Chicago’s minority set-aside program.
But the suspicion here is a second public corruption unit won’t be mopping up existing indictments. It will be on the trail of new business.
