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player ready...Forces aligned with deposed Chicago Park District Supt. Edmund Kelly struck back at the Washington adminstration Wednesday, calling for an emergency park board meeting to craft legal action against the mayor`s new appointees.
At the same time, the appointees, who spent the day touring five of the district`s parks, charged that Kelly has hired more than 70 new employees this week in an attempt to reward loyalists before he leaves office.
Mayor Harold Washington`s allies, led by Jesse Madison, the park district`s recently appointed executive vice president, also moved ahead with threats to fire a parks employee Thursday in the three-day-old dispute over who is in charge of the district and its $320 million budget.
In a hand-delivered memo to Michael Hennessy, park board attorney and a Kelly loyalist, Madison said Hennessy would be fired Thursday unless he withdrew a directive that park employees should not cooperate with the mayor`s forces.
Hennessy`s directive, issued Tuesday, prohibited employees from taking any orders from Washington`s appointees or from releasing ”any information of any kind to them.”
”You will please promptly issue a recision of your memorandum and deliver it to all persons who received the June 16 directive,” Madison wrote in the memo to Hennessy.
”If this action is not taken by the end of the business day on Thursday, I will be forced to discharge you summarily for insubordinaton and obstructive behavior.”
Madison suggested that further firings may follow as he begins to assemble a new management team to run the park district and its 3,400 full-time employees, about 1,000 of whom are Democratic precinct captains from around the city. Also, an esti-
mated 500 are from the North Side 47th Ward, where Kelly is Democratic ward committeeman.
”I will be assembling a team of people for certain key positions in areas like budget and personnel, and it may or may not include the people already in those jobs,” Madison said.
”As for the rank and file, they will be given a chance to perform and if they do, they have nothing to fear from me. If they don`t, they have everything to fear.”
Madison also said that a ”reliable source within the park district”
informed him Wednesday that Kelly has added 77 new employees since Monday when the superintendent was stripped of his power during two raucous park board meetings. One park district source told The Tribune that about 70 people have been hired or promoted this week.
”I think that figure sounds high,” said park treasurer Jack Mathews, though he added he was not confirming that any hiring or promoting had occurred. Personnel director Herman Kranz did not return a phone call inquiring about the action.
Although Monday`s coup by the mayor`s allies seated architect Walter Netsch as park board president, former president John McHugh on Wednesday scheduled a special board meeting Thursday morning to consider what a lawyer working with McHugh termed ”appropriate legal action.”
Attorney J. William Braithwaite said he and Hennessy will recommend legal action, but he declined to detail any specifics.
”This needs to be decided by the appropriate court,” Braithwaite said.
”President McHugh feels very strongly that the business of the parks must go on under whatever leadership the courts deem appropriate.”
Braithwaite said Thursday`s agenda also calls for a report on ”the attempt to hold a board meeting” last Monday.
Madison and Netsch met with city corporation counsel Judson Minor Wednesday night to plot a response to McHugh`s action, but they were tight-lipped after emerging from the two-hour strategy meeting.
”I won`t be (at the board meeting) but I have directed an action,”
Netsch said. ”We`re perfectly capable of responding to any scenario.”
Madison, who on Tuesday was denied a key to his office and a copy of the park district code from employees loyal to Kelly, joined other board members Wednesday in a fact-finding tour of city parks.
”We`re like the Chicago Bears,” Netsch mused. ”When we can`t go inside, we go outside.”
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Madison and Netsch, joined by newly elected board vice president Margaret Burroughs, appointee Silvia Herrera, a city planner and a representative of the watchdog Friends of the Parks group, toured Garfield, Douglas, Humboldt, Marquette and Washington Parks.
Though Burroughs confessed that she found conditions ”not nearly as bad as I had anticipated,” she observed that Marquette, the one park that is in a mostly white neighborhood, was the best maintained.
”Look at what they get here,” Burroughs said, gesturing to a neatly trimmed 9-hole golf course. ”From what I`ve seen, the programs and services are not equitable in the parks in black areas of the city.”
At Garfield Park, city planner George Cooley pointed to a gymnasium and swimming pool constructed last year that he said have already required a series of costly repairs. Cooley said that two months after the gymnasium floor was laid it began to buckle and had to be replaced for $27,000.
The outdoor swimming pool, which was constructed on a land-fill over a lagoon, has been closed several times because of cracks in the bottom, he said.
”People ask us where is the money going to come” to finance new programs, Netsch said. ”I would hope it would come from not making these kind of mistakes. . . . We`re finding buildings in disarray, lagoons mismanaged and misused, choices in renovation that no good architectural department would ever undertake. It`s a disgrace.”
Despite the relatively plush conditions at Marquette, at least one of the South Side park`s users had a suggestion.
”Hiya,” said golfer John Prisco, 67, when he spotted the tour group.
”Is it possible to get another water fountain out on the golf course? We have one on the fifth and seventh holes, but we could sure use one on the third.”
The park board members, thirsty themselves after a long day in the sun, promised they would look into it.