Mayor Richard Daley on Wednesday defended his administration`s use of a special tax to pay for the salaries of police dispatchers instead of a new 911 facility, and he denied charges from aldermen that he had concealed the expense.
”I`m not lying to anyone,” said Daley, who clearly was agitated.
The mayor`s comments came in reaction to a Tribune article Wednesday that showed that more than a third of the city`s 95-cents-a-month telephone surcharge, touted by the mayor as a way to build a new, urgently needed 911 system, has instead been used to pay the salaries of police dispatchers.
Since January 1990, about $25 million has been collected from the tax, records show, but $9.5 million of it has gone to dispatchers` salaries.
At a City Hall news conference, Daley waved a photocopied page of the 1990 budget, on which the transfer of funds was listed as a one-line item. He said the use of the funds was stated clearly there, and aldermen, and presumably the public, should have known about it.
In an unusual move, city Chief Financial Officer Edward Bedore also spoke at the news conference. Bedore said aldermen had been informed in a 1989 budget hearing that phone-tax funds would be used to pay for dispatchers`
salaries.
The Tribune on Wednesday could not locate an alderman who recalled that testimony from the often sparsely attended budget hearings.
Records of the Chicago Emergency Telephone System Board, the city agency charged with building the new facility, show that the board spent $8.5 million on dispatchers` salaries over 17 months before passing a resolution in May authorizing this use of the tax money.
Aldermen had mixed reactions to the revelations about the city`s use of the phone tax, and Daley`s defense of it.
Ald. Joe Moore (49th), a Daley critic, called the spending on salaries
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”a subterfuge.”
”Paying guys just to answer calls is a hell of a lot different than paying to develop a new system,” Moore said. ”And not to let the public know what you`re doing is irresponsible, it seems to me.”
Donald C. Smith, a spokesman for pro-administration Ald. Mark Fary
(12th), said that ”although the mayor did not come down and say, `We`re using the tax for salaries,` we`ve got to keep the system running. That`s the bottom line.”
In explaining his use of the phone-tax funds to pay salaries, Daley offered his sharpest criticism to date of the current system, which was once a state-of-the-art facility imitated by other big cities.
”The system has collapsed,” Daley said. ”They`ve got bobby pins holding it together.”
City officials have said that the use of phone-tax funds to supplement dispatchers` salaries will not delay completion of the new system, or increase its estimated $95 million budget.