Were it not for the scandals that have made FBI agents the real clout crowd at City Hall, the re-election of Richard M. Daley to a sixth term as mayor wouldn’t trigger much discussion in Chicago. There would be praise for the reconstruction of O’Hare International Airport, gratitude that “The city has never looked better,” grumbles about traffic and mass transit–with all of that hushed as a smiling Daley gets the last word: landslide.
He may still get the landslide. But that familiar election sequence is a relic of the epoch before federal judges, federal prosecutors and federal agents had to delouse Chicago’s municipal government. That troubling reality–of feds demanding the honest public service that city officials did not–now suffuses every discussion of Daley and his reign. When he met with the Tribune editorial board on Feb. 2, Daley said Chicago is moving in the right direction yet faces obstacles. The first obstacle he mentioned was–the mayor’s word–“corruption.”
He didn’t dwell on that topic as long as we will–even as we endorse his re-election. How can that be? How can a mayor whose regime has been sullied by so much misbehavior among his minions deserve … another four years?
Because while corruption at City Hall is critically important, it is one of three crucial variables on which Daley should be graded. On the other two, he has performed uniquely well. And, as we’ll set forth, he still has ways to keep the corruption on his watch from being the dreadful legacy that his great-grandchildren learn in school.
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Richard M. Daley’s noblest contribution to Chicago is a quiet redirection of the city he inherited in 1989–a racially cleaved metropolis with a searing nickname The Wall Street Journal had coined: “Beirut on the lake.” The Tribune tried to synthesize his crowning achievement in an editorial that appeared April 19, 2005:
What truly distinguishes today’s Richard Daley from many big-city mayors is his remarkable if impossible-to-complete work to narrow racial chasms that, during the 1980s, threatened to swallow Chicago. He has done that not with anguished speeches or paeans to social justice, but by projecting, over 16 years, a strong sense of fairness in the way he does his job. As a result, he has persuaded many Chicagoans, of many hues, to pull in the same direction: up.
Chicago isn’t only about race. But when race is wrong here, when ugly tensions blind this city to its largely cooperative past and its richly promising future, not much gets done. Daley has not solved those tensions. He has, though, worked hard to diminish their scope and impact. Regrettably, he gets little credit for that. This city’s overt racial rancor was so ugly that many of us have put it out of our minds.
Better we never forget, never repeat.
The mayor’s second key feat is his obsessive focus on the quality-of-life issues that hold the power to enthrall, or to infuriate, Chicagoans:
– A dozen years ago, he tied his national reputation to the ambitious mission of school reform, a job most urban mayors–his late father included–spent whole careers avoiding.
– More recently he dismantled many of the high-rise warehouses that had ghettoized generations of Chicago Housing Authority residents in suffocating concentrations of poverty.
– Angry that Chicago was America’s big-city murder capital, he empowered his police department–as well as private outreach efforts such as CeaseFire–to disrupt the bloodthirsty Chicago nexus of gangs, guns and drugs. As a result, more people live on somewhat safer streets.
– Though he lacks the vast federal funding that turned earlier mayors into master builders, Daley is upgrading Chicago’s steel and concrete infrastructure, and not just at its airports. New libraries and buried sewer projects don’t stir many souls. But glamorless work today assures that a city can survive and thrive tomorrow.
– As for all those trees, those cleaner parks, those planters on streets where tourists now roam–well, the city has never looked better.
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If only those successes bounded Daley’s realm.
Never in his 18-year mayoralty has Daley unequivocally challenged City Hall’s culture of corruption. Instead, he has contradicted himself on the issue that, depending on what he does next, will define his legacy more than any other.
Daley’s record on this isn’t linear. He wants to have corruption two ways: as a damnable sin, but minus consequences that count. Consider:
Relentless federal probes have provoked bolder changes at City Hall than Daley himself engineered in his first 16 years as mayor. Within the last two years, he has done more than any of his predecessors to encourage the investigation of crooks on the city payroll. He points with pride to a newly muscular–and genuinely independent–office of inspector general, with 40 investigators and, soon, an audit team of six more.
As is, the city’s pliant audit function is more about damage control than about rooting out crime. Imagine how many scandals–the criminal favoritism of Hired Truck, the patronage scams at Intergovernmental Affairs, the tree-removal bribes at Streets and Sanitation–truly autonomous auditors could have intercepted before those humiliations rained down on Daley.
Even as he defends his assault on corruption, though, the mayor can’t bring himself to say that his convicted former patronage chief, Robert Sorich, did anything wrong. Never mind that Sorich and three former city government associates were found guilty of corruption in a hiring scheme that rewarded loyal political workers. Never mind that honest citizens lost out on jobs and promotions to serial frauds in which insiders rigged test results and faked interviews.
Nor will Daley fire the former Buildings Department deputy instrumental in hiring a 19-year-old city inspector whose dad was a union boss. Christopher Kozicki still draws his six-figure city salary despite his admission in a federal trial that he helped rig the teen’s hiring. Daley says he fears intimidating potential witnesses in city corruption cases by firing Kozicki–who just happens to be tied into the mayor’s political operation. The real story is that, although Kozicki’s actions created a public safety risk, Daley is protecting him. That’s an outrage.
Put these sorry cases–Sorich et al. and Kozicki–together and you have the mayor’s message: Wish things hadn’t gone south. But you took care of us, so we’re not coming after you.
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Will Daley’s next term be his last?
His Feb. 27 victory over challengers Dorothy Brown and William “Dock” Walls will extend his tenure to 22 years, one more than his father’s. He’ll start his next term with only one thing yet to prove: that he can eradicate the most serious stain on his mayoralty. More than most of us, Daley gets to choose how he’ll be remembered.
Maybe he’ll continue to parry with City Hall corruption as he has since 2005, engaging it but not eviscerating it. If, though, he makes three moves, he can signal that he intends to defeat the challenge that’s always gotten the best of him.
The mayor needs to stop protecting crooks from consequences, both in his judgments of them and in their employment status. The simple message: You defraud Chicago, you’re gone.
The mayor also needs to demand that the 50 City Council members end the exemption that protects them from internal investigations. The case of indicted Ald. Arenda Troutman (20th) exposes a classic Chicago farce: FBI agents are investigating an alleged zoning scam–because the city’s designated crime-busters in the inspector general’s office are forbidden by ordinance from asking aldermen anything but the time of day.
And Daley needs to answer his own calls for transparency in government by authorizing the release of every inspector general’s final report alleging misconduct. As is, those de facto indictments are shielded as internal documents–as if government belongs to city apparatchiks rather than to the citizens who pay their salaries.
Most of those citizens don’t expect government to be perfect or pristine. They do, though, expect government to do all within its power to stop the corruption that systematically cheats minority contractors, or honest job-seekers, or law-abiding employees of that government itself.
Many among us will crack wise: An honest City Hall is a Chicago oxymoron–just as preposterous as, say, improvement in a public school system that a U.S. education secretary once labeled the nation’s worst.
Just as preposterous as a Chicago rid of those high-rise public housing ghettos.
As preposterous as takedowns of homicidal drug gangs that long roamed free.
As preposterous as a 21st Century O’Hare.
As preposterous as the beautification of a city that visitors used to call dingy.
During his appearance at the Tribune editorial board, the mayor said he doesn’t want to break his father’s record of service so much as he wants to do things that others haven’t done.
Here’s what should be at the top of that list: ending the culture of corruption at City Hall.
We endorse Richard M. Daley’s re-election as mayor with the hope that he’ll spend the next four years doing just that.
