Mayor Richard Daley flatly rejected the notion Tuesday that cuts in the city’s Personnel Department contributed to patronage hiring in his administration.
Since taking office in 1989, Daley slashed staffing in the Personnel Department by 54 percent, the Tribune reported Sunday. The department was supposed to keep politics out of City Hall hiring. But after a federal probe, two former high-level Daley administration officials recently pleaded guilty to leading illegal patronage armies that doled out city jobs and promotions to campaign workers.
Asked at a Tuesday news conference if there was any connection between the budget cuts and violations of federal court decrees against political hiring, Daley replied, “No, none whatsoever.”
The mayor declined to say whether he believed current and former city workers who told the Tribune that their jobs depended on doing political work for pro-Daley political groups. City workers who refused to do campaign work or to buy tickets to political fundraisers said they were fired without reason or transferred to work sites across town from their homes.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Daley said. “These are a lot of allegations.”
Daley cut the Personnel Department by more than half, to 84 employees this year from 178 when he became mayor. He only recently took steps to rebuild the department after being told to by a federal court.
At the news conference, Daley recited how he cut positions in other city departments and said the reduced Personnel Department staffing was a result of “consolidation, outsourcing and using other departments as similar functions–simple as that.”
Federal prosecutors allege that top Daley aides committed hiring fraud by conducting sham interviews and falsifying documents. Authorities said the scheme was intended to reward political workers loyal to the mayor’s campaign organization.
The pro-Daley political groups allegedly took their orders from aides in the mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.
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Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) said he was not surprised to learn that the Personnel Department had shrunk.
“Obviously, somebody else was doing the work,” Munoz said, referring to the intergovernmental affairs office.
Personnel Department officials never seemed to be in charge of the hiring process, said Ald. Howard Brookins (21st). He said he was dismayed that Daley’s former personnel commissioner, Glenn Carr, admitted never reading the federal court decree restricting political hiring.
“Personnel didn’t do much of anything,” Brookins said.
Ald. William J.P. Banks (36th) said he does not think the mayor had personal knowledge of wrongdoing in the hiring process.
“He clearly knew there were a number of volunteer [political] groups out there helping the cause,” Banks said. “How rewards were doled out is a subject of investigation.”
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