Asked Friday about potential challenger Paul Vallas’ suggestion that he couldn’t be trusted to handle city finances, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tried to pull his punches.
Twice, the mayor was asked. And twice, he declined to answer. The third time, though, Emanuel let it rip.
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“This is a person who is the architect of kicking the can down the road. … It took the city of Chicago seven long, hard years to fix what he broke and was an architect for breaking,” Emanuel said of Vallas, who worked as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s budget director and Chicago Public Schools CEO. “We’re not going back. It’s not going to be back to the future. And I’ll just say this, since today is the day: We’re not having Groundhog Day again here in Chicago. It’s not gonna happen.”
Vallas responded by saying Emanuel lied, comparing the mayor to Republican President Donald Trump and stressing that the financial morass that formed at Daley’s City Hall did so after he departed in 2001 to run an unsuccessful bid for governor.
“Besides it being an absolute bold-face lie and an embarrassing lie — if you’re going to lie, don’t lie about something that can so easily be refuted. C’mon. I thought he was more sophisticated than that,” Vallas said of Emanuel. “This is what politicians do when they have a lot of money and they have a record they really don’t want to run on. Like Trump, Rahm thinks if he can repeat the lies enough times, people will begin to believe them. I have a lot more faith in the public than Rahm has.”
The tit-for-tat came after Vallas, who is considering a run for mayor in 2019, surfaced at a City Club of Chicago luncheon Wednesday to tell reporters that Emanuel should have acted faster after taking office in 2011 to address the shortfalls in four city worker pension systems and the deep debt at CPS.
“The bottom line is they punted for four years, and after the election, suddenly the sword of Damocles comes crashing down,” Vallas said, referring to the more than $1 billion in tax increases enacted since Emanuel’s re-election in 2015. “The question that one has to ask oneself is, ‘Do you trust the current mayor to steer the city in the right direction?’”
On Friday, Emanuel zeroed in on Vallas’ time in the Daley administration. The current mayor slammed Vallas as having a role in skipping pension payments, eliminating dedicated property taxes for teacher pensions and putting off difficult decisions with the city’s budget.
“It’s been a long, hard effort by all of us in the city to fix what he left behind,” Emanuel said, accusing Vallas of being behind an orchestrated plan “to literally kick the can down the road for somebody else to fix the problem they left behind.”
As has been his custom, Emanuel did not mention his predecessor Daley by name. Emanuel also ignored a question about Vallas’ assertion that the mayor put off dealing with the city’s financial woes.
While Vallas was in the Daley administration when some of the initial decisions were made that helped lead to the city’s financial erosion, much of the damage occurred after he left City Hall.
When Vallas was budget director, the four pension funds were in much better standing than they are now, and the teachers fund was in good shape when he started at CPS in 1995. A Daley-engineered state law that allowed the mayor to divert money away from pension funds to school operations was passed when Vallas was budget director and just before his move over to CPS.
While the district skipped some pension payments on Vallas’ watch, the teachers pension fund was still sound when he left CPS in 2001. Vallas blamed his successors for not keeping the city’s commitments on funding pensions.
“I must have gotten under Rahm’s skin. There must be some inside poll or something and he’s trying to take me out early,” Vallas said Friday, laughing. “I’m very amused, and quite frankly, I’m flattered he would respond so quickly rather than ignore me.”
Vallas, who most recently served as a high-paid administrator at Chicago State University, has run school districts in Philadelphia, Louisiana and Bridgeport, Conn. The Chicago native recently moved back into the city and has said he’ll make a decision on whether to run against Emanuel by the end of March.
Twitter @BillRuthhart
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