Mayor Richard Daley may want a dramatic overhaul of city personnel practices following federal allegations of widespread fraud, but aldermen on Friday suggested Daley will have a hard sell with the group he needs most: the City Council.
The aldermen questioned the need for such drastic change, the effectiveness of Daley’s proposed new approach and its fairness.
And some figure that colleagues who have been successful placing their referrals on the city payroll over the years would have their own reasons for not being keen on Daley’s plan.
“I support the mayor 100 percent,” said Ald. Bernard Stone (50th). “But when I think he is wrong, I will say so.
“If there was a vote today, I don’t think it would pass,” said Ald. Isaac Carothers (29th).
“You don’t drop an atom bomb on an ant hill,” said Ald. Thomas Allen (38th), another alderman who usually is in the mayor’s camp.
Daley on Thursday called for creation of an independent public service commission that would take hiring and promotions out of City Hall. Commission members, appointed by the mayor and City Council, would oversee a staff that would be take applications and test and select people for jobs and promotions.
Aldermen, who would have to approve the proposal, weren’t the only ones who were skeptical about it.
Politics can be removed from a hiring process, but Daley’s plan probably would do more harm than good when it comes to city services, said Steve Kelman, professor of public management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
“It’s simply a bad personnel practice to have some outside body of people hiring for a city agency,” he said. “The executives and managers are going to know a lot more about what an agency needs than some central three-member commission. It seems like a step backward.”
Stone agreed.
A commission would have “no concept of what goes into the jobs that they are going to be handing out,” he said. “They are going to be reading a book on it? That’s not the way you do it. You have to work inside the system to learn the system.”
But Daley won support from a former mayoral colleague.
Stephen Goldsmith, Indianapolis’ mayor from 1992 to 1999 and now a Kennedy School professor of government, said the new proposal is “a great idea.”
The commission would be able to set standards and establish rules, he said. But the key would be to design a system that would select quality candidates and allow commissioners to be watchdogs for the system’s integrity, he said.
Insulating city officials
Daley said a key reason for the new approach is to insulate city officials from possible criminal charges for violating the federal Shakman decree, which prohibits political considerations in hiring and promotion of all but about 1,000 of the city’s 38,000 jobs.
Investigators last week filed charges against two senior officials, including Daley’s patronage chief, who allegedly violated the decree, rigged interviews, altered records and greased the way for the politically connected at the expense of applicants who may have been more qualified.
Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22rd) questioned the advertised independence of the personnel board.
“If you are being appointed by the mayor and the council, those are two constituencies that have demonstrated a hunger for patronage,” he said. “Conceptually, that doesn’t sound independent.”
“If run properly, this would be a great idea,” said Ald. Thomas Murphy (18th). But “I think people take whatever the system is and try to circumvent it. It remains to be seen whether this would be an actual improvement.”
Cynthia Bowman, a Northwestern University law professor, said procedures have been in place for years as a result of the Shakman decree that were designed to prevent political considerations from entering the city’s hiring practices.
The responsibility for hiring may move to another body under Daley’s plan, but that would do little to solve the problem without a shift in culture, said Bowman, who was part of a team of lawyers hired to draft the procedures in the mid-1980s.
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“It seems as though they’re trying to reach for something new and dramatic, so it will distance the problem from City Hall. If there’s just a procedure without the actual commitment to follow the procedures, people will get around it.”
Concerns about diversity
Daley himself acknowledged “mixed feelings” about his proposal, in part because of a possible loss of control of racial and ethnic diversity initiatives.
Minority aldermen had similar reservations.
“I would be very concerned about what this panel is going to do to make sure the employees reflect, to some degree, the composition of the city,” commented Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th). “That is a very, very problematic area.
“Merit selection has never benefited minorities, because someone usually makes the test who is not a minority,” Lyle said.
Aldermen opposed to the commission proposal seemed to agree on what they believe would be a better approach.
“Why can’t we just fix what’s in place already?” Allen asked. “All the mayor has to do is say, `No references, no recommendations, nobody should influence the hiring in any way.'”
“Most of the people in the council I talk to seem to think that city hiring can happen within city government as it happens in every other [public] agency,” Carothers said.
The two officials charged earlier this week allegedly “were involved in shredding and changing test scores and things like that. If you take that out of the mix, there are no indictments,” Carothers said.
Chester Newland, a John Duggan Distinguished Professor in Public Administration at the University of Southern California, said that most local governments have personnel offices that are under the direction of city managers or personnel boards.
But in the last several years, Newland said, there has been a new trend in contracting out staffing.
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