Last Tuesday morning Ald. Timothy Evans (4th) talked of his plans for reform of the Chicago City Council.
As chairman of the Committee on Finance and Mayor Harold Washington`s council floor leader, Evans is the most influential member of the 50-member council-an alderman whom Washington had singled out five days earlier as one who should ”get about the business of resolving” the embarrassment that is the nation`s largest municipal lawmaking body.
Evans told a reporter that in response to a series in The Tribune on council corruption he would review other city councils to arrive at a model for change.
”We are prepared to clean up our own house as a city council,” he added.
What Evans did not say was that two hours earlier he had quietly dispatched a member of his Finance Committee to meet with Ald. Lawrence Bloom (5th), chairman of the council`s Budget Committee, and submit a last-minute addition to Bloom`s committee meeting agenda. That addition asked Budget Committee members to slice $61,000 out of the city`s fund for worker`s compensation claims and bestow it upon six council committees.
Among the committees slated for the year-end windfall was one that, until Friday, had not met since July. Another is run by an alderman who had used the committee payroll to hire the daughter of his political mentor and ward committeeman.
The reason for the hasty transfer of funds? The committees` vice chairmen were upset that they hadn`t been able to add their own workers to the patronage-packed committee payrolls and they wanted amends before year`s end. In light of another tremor on Chicago`s political landscape last week-the trial and bribery conviction of former Ald. Wallace Davis Jr. (27th), accused by a prosecutor of running his office ”like a toll booth”-Evans` action and the Budget Committee`s approval of the transfer was a trifle.
But its timing illustrates the arrogance and duplicity that have prevented reform of a council that has seen 13 of its members convicted of crimes related to their offices in the last 15 years.
A six-month investigation by The Tribune uncovered widespread waste, patronage and conflicts of interest in the council. Thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews depicted a council whose members routinely place their interests before that of the public.
If Evans` actions are any measure, reform of the council may be an uphill battle that hinges on how much pressure Washington and his allies receive to revive a series of dormant legislative proposals. And it may provide the most crucial test of just how serious the mayor is about backing up the reform rhetoric he has spouted since his election, rhetoric that so far has been called into question by a major federal investigation and the mayor`s failure to clean up the abuses it highlighted.
”There are members of the City Council who are embarrassed by what was in The Tribune,” Washington told a luncheon of television reporters Thursday. ”I will guarantee I will be a partner in cleaning up those problems.
”I didn`t vote for them,” he said of the aldermen. ”The only one I voted for was my own. I didn`t vote for the other 49. I will not take the jacket for that.”
When Washington and his council allies were struggling to wrest control of Chicago`s government from a powerful cadre of aldermen, the mayor often criticized council leadership as wasteful, even corrupt.
Now that Washington`s supporters run the council, the mayor, like his predecessors, appears more than willing to use expensive patronage to win the support of aldermen. Though Washington blustered that he would investigate the committees, his 1988 budget includes an additional $646,814 in spending for many do-nothing committees. For Washington`s council allies, winning control, it seems, is less an opportunity for reform than a chance to share in the spoils of government.
The historic cynicism of city officials and the public has permitted flagrant abuses to flourish in the council. In Chicago, a legendary haven for municipal corruption, even some segments of the press yawn at the newest scandal.
Last week, following disclosures that aldermen have routinely diverted city money to themselves and their friends and often vote on measures that affect their business clients, one radio talk show host asked: ”So is this news?”
An editorial commentator on another radio station sadly noted that the biggest tragedy was not the disclosure of greed and profiteering, but the depressing chances for reform.
And in the City Hall press room, where some members of the Chicago media cover daily government proceedings but rarely get the opportunity to delve beyond, a radio station recorded that the typical response was: We knew this all along, even though we`ve reported little about it.
Indeed, Vivian Weil, who teaches business ethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and has conducted ethics seminars for city officials, said this sneering attitude may be the biggest stumbling block to reform in Chicago.
”One of the things that is important to remember is that there is a long-entrenched way of doing things in the city,” she said. ”It`s very hard to get out from under such revered practices.”
But judging from the letters that came in as a result of the newspaper`s series, some Chicagoans are getting impatient with bloated government financed by rising taxes, and they are struggling to find a blueprint for change.
”I think it`s time that me, and people like me, stop reading such articles as yours on the criminal handling of our City Council and saying
`tsk, tsk` and turning the pages,” wrote one North Side resident. ”How can I effect a change? Tell me what to do to arouse people like me. And can we make a difference? Maybe now is a good time.”
How to revamp a council that by all accounts is wallowing in self-interest, patronage and parochial politics?
Reform-minded aldermen and other officials say that beyond the difficult task of eliminating attitudes that have perpetuated a corrupt City Council, there are some specific measures that would make it harder for aldermen to abuse their positions.
For one thing, they say, the city`s much-heralded new ethics law must not only be defended against the aldermen who want to scuttle it, it must be made stronger to impose penalties on council members who violate it.
”I`m intensely aware of the desire on the part of some aldermen who want to weaken the ethics ordinance,” said Harriet McCullough, executive director of the mayor`s Board of Ethics, which reviews allegations of wrongdoing by city officials. ”They have not been discreet.”
A handful of aldermen, including Fred Roti (1st), who sells insurance to the city in a clear but long-ignored conflict of interest, have been lobbying to repeal or limit the ordinance. Roti, for one, has tried to convince his colleagues that a provision of the ordinance requiring extensive economic disclosure just gives the press fodder to criticize aldermen.
This effort by Roti and other aldermen is particularly hypocritical, given that the council unanimously approved the ethics ordinance on the eve of the last council election.
The ordinance`s defenders take heart in their belief that the publicity generated by disclosure of widespread conflicts in the council will make it difficult for aldermen to gut the ordinance, said Michael Holewinski, a top mayoral aide who was instrumental in the drafting of the ethics law.
But the fight to protect the ethics ordinance should not overshadow the fact that it does not even address most of the abuses that plague the council. Once the ordinance is saved, it must be broadened to get at the kind of corruption that has come to rule the council.
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For example, while the ordinance set up an agency to investigate violations by city workers, it decreed that only one body could investigate aldermen-the council itself.
The ordinance lists various penalties for wayward government workers, from firings to criminal prosecution. But it does not address specific penalties for aldermen, except to say punishment should be set by the council`s Committee on Rules.
Aldermen have traditionally used this committee to bury controversial legislation, including a handful of still-languishing reform laws. As one measure of this committee`s ability to police the council, consider that former Ald. Clifford Kelley (20th), chairman of the committee when the ethics law was passed, pleaded guilty several months ago to taking bribes from city contractors.
Former U.S. Atty. Thomas Sullivan, whose landmark 1986-87 study of corruption in government was heralded by Mayor Washington as a necessary first step for reform, said he is stung by the fact that his toughest suggestions were rejected in debate over the ordinance.
”No present elected city official has supported my recommendations,”
Sullivan said in an interview Thursday. Recalling the praise Washington heaped on his $600,000 taxpayer-financed report when it was completed last spring, Sullivan said, ”It was all very nice, and he was going to have people look at it. As far as I know they`re still looking at it. Nobody enacted anything from a report they spent a lot of money to get.”
Sullivan`s report was commissioned shortly after disclosure of allegations that a high-flying New York company vying for city bill-collection contracts had paid off high-ranking city officials, including at least four aldermen.
For one thing, Sullivan recommended that the ethics board be permitted to investigate aldermen as well as other officials. He also said that the city`s Office of Municipal Investigations, which investigates charges of corruption in the executive branch of the city government, should be permitted to look into the legislative branch as well.
Otherwise, Sullivan and McCullough said, there is no system to conduct an independent investigation of an alderman.
”The only recourse is the citizenry who elects them and the media,”
said McCullough. ”But ultimately it comes back to the citizens.”
She added, ”Citizens get what they deserve.”
McCullough`s comments seem to offer little hope, given that former Ald. Kelley received 46.6 percent of the vote in his last election, despite an indictment that accused him of taking bribes from a waste hauler that runs a giant dump near his ward.
Another reform that has been foundering in council committees for two years is a proposal by Ald. David Orr (49th) that would force council members to account for how they spend their $1,500 monthly office expense accounts.
That money is supposed to be used to rent, furnish and staff satellite offices in aldermanic ward headquarters across the city. But the investigation found that at least six aldermen pocket the money, while others pay rent to themselves and political associates. None of the aldermen returned any of the expense money, even though many said they really didn`t need it to run their offices.
Following the report on the office expense accounts, Ald. Evans introduced a council resolution calling for hearings to set ”guidelines” on how aldermen may spend their expense allowances and committee budgets. However, interviews with aldermen indicate the measure may be in for a fight. Even Ald. Marlene Carter (15th), who does not pocket any of the city money, said, ”I think it`s your personal business” how the expense money is spent.
Orr, who two years ago watched his ordinance calling for public accounting of expense accounts go down to defeat, has won nothing but derision from his colleagues for his persistent efforts to push council reforms. Some of his allies recently threatened to take his name off legislation calling for apartment security locks because of his public cries for stringent ethics laws.
If Washington`s proposed 1988 budget is any measure, the one reform that the city`s self-professed reform mayor will not push is a revamping of the expensive network of council committees. The 28 committees-many of them patronage havens that rarely meet and that do little work-spent much of their budgets on items such as beepers, car phones, gifts, travel, computers, video equipment and office furniture.
If Washington`s budget passes, they will be able to buy even more of these luxury items. The new budget includes a 12.5 percent increase for the council`s 28 committees, which would raise their budget from the $5.2 million appropriated in 1987 to $5.82 million.
Washington had proclaimed that he would investigate the committees and that there should be fewer of them.
One reform effort that is winning some support is a plan to eliminate potential corruption in the council`s stranglehold over zoning.
Last week, The Tribune reported that aldermen routinely sponsor zoning changes for unidentified businesses. For example, Ald. Sheneather Butler
(27th) supported a change that benefitted a liquor store in which her father has a secret interest.
Following that report, Ald. Danny Davis (29th), the newly appointed chairman of the council`s Committee on Zoning, said he would push legislation to eliminate such anonymous zoning changes.
Meanwhile, Davis and other Zoning Committee members would do well to study a growing trend in big city zoning: the establishment of independent hearing boards that weigh zoning changes on the merits, as opposed to political connections.
Even if some of these specific reforms are implemented, the key obstacle remains a cynical city government that for generations has been unwilling to let go of the spoils of its power.
Indeed, the abuses are regarded as every day occurrences in city business.
For example, one of the disclosures in the series was that Ald. William Henry (24th) had used his position to push his soft drink, Soul Cola. Henry tried to get it sold at city festivals, and he lobbied the city to lend $1.3 million to the one supermarket chain that carries the drink.
Some aldermen observed that the Henry story was actually great publicity for the West Side alderman, a view apparently shared by Henry. At the last council meeting, the burly alderman approached a reporter and smiled broadly. ”Thank you,” he said. ”I`m going to send you guys a case of Soul Cola every day.”