Christopher Kozicki rigged an interview score to hire a politically connected teenager as a building inspector, but Mayor Richard Daley Tuesday defended the decision to keep Kozicki on the city payroll.
To fire him, Daley said, would send the wrong message after he testified in last year’s federal hiring fraud trial.
Kozicki, a Bridgeport resident who has political ties to the Daley family, was a top Buildings Department official when he was granted immunity to testify in the case of four officials charged with fixing city hiring and promotions to favor mayoral allies.
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Kozicki said he falsified a score to ensure the hiring of the 19-year-old son of a senior carpenters union official.
City Inspector General David Hoffman had recommended that Kozicki be fired because his actions caused a risk to public safety. But the city’s Law Department rejected the recommendation, and Daley endorsed the decision.
“If you start going after people who participate and [who are] cooperating [with prosecutors], then you are really in jeopardy,” the mayor said. “You can’t do that … If someone is cooperating, you can’t then judge him afterwards.”
Prosecutors sought to treat Kozicki as a hostile witness after he surprised them by testifying that then-Buildings Commissioner Stan Kaderbek, and not the mayor’s office, was primarily responsible for engineering the teen’s hiring.
Daley said he played no role in the Law Department’s decision on Kozicki, who now is a senior official in the Planning Department with a salary of about $130,000 a year.
Jennifer Hoyle, a Law Department spokeswoman, has said that any action against city employees alleged to have committed wrongdoing will be deferred until the continuing federal investigation has been completed.
Mayoral candidate Dorothy Brown was quick to pounce on Daley’s comments.
“I think that we’re right back to the same thing: business as usual,” she said. Daley “is letting us know that he’s really not committed to ridding out corruption in City Hall.”
Brown spoke at a news conference where it was announced that she was among candidates who have won the endorsement of the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization.
Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th), who also got the group’s backing, said Kozicki should be terminated.
“What is the message supposed to be?” she asked. “How much is enough? How many bites of the apple do you get?”
On another subject Tuesday, Daley scoffed at allegations in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by developer Thomas Snitzer, who claimed that the city wrongly shut down work on his Bridgeport Village subdivision in 2004 because of pressure from 11th Ward power brokers, including former mayoral aide Timothy Degnan.
“That has been floated around for years,” Daley said. “He was trying to sell that a year ago to everyone. It’s around election time. People say a lot of things and do a lot of things.”
Daley’s comments came at the ribbon-cutting for a new senior citizen apartment building at 1401 W. Roosevelt Rd.
The mayor also spoke about the city’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, including a plan to build an Olympic village above truck parking lots near McCormick Place.
Daley said he foresees a day when decks will be built over Chicago expressways and parks constructed on them to rid the city of barriers between neighborhoods.
“In this city, highways really divide communities,” he said. “Eventually, you are going to see air rights [developments] over highways.”
Daley used a similar strategy with Millennium Park, which was built above Metra railroad tracks.
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