The new face of Chicago-style democracy was on display Tuesday as aldermen handed Mayor Rahm Emanuel his expected lopsided win on a controversial plan to lure billions in private investment to rebuild the city.
The first-year mayor is willing to compromise, but only to a point. And while he might give City Council members a bit more time to consider measures that could have decades-long impacts on Chicago’s finances, he still gets to set the schedule.
Emanuel held out those changes as a break from his predecessor, Richard Daley, who wasn’t always concerned with such niceties. Yet at the end of the day, both Emanuel and Daley have proved able to score comfortable margins on major proposals that remained mostly intact.
“What we don’t do is to try and compromise, ever, the objective or the goal. That’s clear,” Emanuel said of his governing approach after the council voted 41-7 to approve the Chicago Infrastructure Trust. “And then you work with the legislative body and include their ideas, when you can, that don’t compromise getting to the essential goal.”
Emanuel’s victory left a handful of aldermen discouraged after they tried and failed for even greater oversight and transparency safeguards for the five-member board the mayor will appoint to craft deals with private investors to pay for major public works projects.
“Kudos to the mayor for having these conversations,” said Ald. John Arena, 45th. “But on something this big I expected something a little more substantive in the first round, and then when the changes were made and so much was made about them not going far enough, why weren’t we really sitting down across the table and working these things out?”
Such extensive give and take is hardly a requirement in a city where being mayor automatically deals you the better hand: broad control of city services and spending. The mayor proposes, the council disposes, and it’s been very difficult in recent decades for aldermen with other ideas to muster a 26-vote majority to stop the city’s chief executive.
Although Emanuel said aldermen could come back later to amend the trust, some council members were skeptical that substantive alterations would ever happen.
“It’s obvious he has the majority of the council on his side, so the changes that are going to be made are the changes the administration wants,” said Ald. Ricardo Munoz, 22nd, the only alderman to oppose the very concept of the trust. “If they don’t want something, they have the votes to stop it.”
Emanuel did agree to some changes before Tuesday’s vote. But he left intact his framework — a board dominated by financiers who will arrange private investment deals as members of a nonprofit trust not subject to all the same rules as city government.
“The fact that he’s not afraid to compromise and not afraid that he’ll be accused of being weak speaks well of his style,” said Ald. Joe Moore, 49th. “This started out as controversial, but he ended getting a vast majority of us to go along with this.”
Moore argued that aldermen were able to make substantive changes involving transparency and accountability, although he added that “the structure of the trust itself was mostly unchanged.”
The mayor took the same approach of limited compromise last year to pass a difficult budget that cut library hours, reduced the number of mental health clinics, decreased staffing at the 911 center and closed police stations. He restored some library cuts and backed off on increasing the vehicle sticker fees for minivans, but kept the blueprint of his original spending plan.
It’s also the same way he won approval last week of a controversial plan to put up automated speed cameras near schools and parks. He changed some of the hours and promised a slow rollout, but won approval for his concept with just minor tweaks.
In all three instances, Emanuel got a clear majority of aldermen to back his efforts, in part by letting them have some say, however small.
In the case of the infrastructure trust, Emanuel agreed to appoint one alderman to the board and ensured a council vote on every trust-financed project involving city money, assets or property. He also added some ethics and sunshine provisions, but good-government groups and critical aldermen said they were not sufficient.
Faced last week with a movement by aldermen to delay approval for up to two months — well after his one-year anniversary as mayor — Emanuel engineered a delay of just six days. The mayor also issued an executive order requiring the trust board to pick analysts to evaluate each deal and to conduct annual financial reviews of the trust.
Some aldermen said those changes still leave the board with too much unchecked power to make as-yet undefined deals that could alter city finances for decades. They asked why the mayor has given only one relatively modest, noncontroversial example of how the trust would be used.
Under what Emanuel has dubbed Retrofit Chicago, private investors would lend the city up to $225 million to make energy efficiency improvements to city buildings. City savings would be used to pay down the debt, but only if they were realized. If not, investors would lose out, city officials said.
But some public-private partnerships entered in other cities have not been so benign.
The handful of projects undertaken in other parts of the United States serve as cautionary tales, experts said, noting that taxpayers likely will pay more for them in the long run and governments in some cases felt pressure to bail them out after they failed.
The projects Chicago is likely to undertake will follow one of two models: those that make money and those that reduce costs through anticipated savings. For example, people who use a new service such as bus rapid transit pay a fee that gets funneled back to the investors.
But Emanuel and his supporters said the city cannot afford to sit idly by while streets, water lines and sewers, along with public transportation facilities, tracks, buses and train cars, continue to deteriorate. Employing traditional city borrowing would push sales and property taxes too high at a time when budget watchdogs have warned the city not to take on more debt, they say.
The trust, Emanuel said, will allow the city to tap laborers’ pension funds, investment firms and not-for-profit organizations willing to take on the risk of backing projects unlikely to get traditional city financing. It also will create badly needed jobs, he said.
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Another concern from aldermen who voted against the plan was that the council will have no say on trust-backed projects exclusively involving Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Transit Authority. The mayor said because the council has no authority over those state-created agencies, changing the measure to give aldermen input could bog down the ordinance in court.
Emanuel said the time has come to move forward.
“We have consensus, we have a crumbling infrastructure,” Emanuel said. “We have consensus, we have people unemployed. … We have consensus that the idea has merit. We have consensus that there needs to be better oversight, transparency, and checks and balances. I hear that, make changes, I adopt that.”
Twitter @ReporterHal