May 31--We were beginning to wonder if Chicago aldermen were serious about having a real voice in decisions about the city's finances.
It's been nearly 18 months, after all, since the City Council voted to hire itself a team to provide guidance on the budget and other money matters.
Given the council's long history of rubber-stamping whatever the mayor put in front of it, creating the office qualified as a bona fide reform -- and the aldermen who voted for it made sure to boast about it as they ran for re-election earlier this year. Never mind that the office remained unfilled.
The lack of urgency was baffling, given the state of Chicago finances and the array of possible solutions that will confront the council: Will Chicago have its own casino and if so, how will it be run? Will the city revisit a proposal to privatize Midway Airport? Where will it find the hundreds of millions needed to balance the budget and make its pension payments this year?
But the panel charged with hiring someone to head the office was deadlocked. Until, that is, Mayor Rahm Emanuel brokered a deal to end the stalemate. The council is finally poised to hire its first budget analyst: Ben Winick, a onetime budget aide to former Gov. Pat Quinn and now vice president of policy at Innovation Illinois, a nonprofit think tank.
The council is expected to approve the hire in June. Winick, who will have a staff of four, will need to get the office up and running quickly, because the mayor's team will be cranking out proposals fast.
Will there be a line of aldermen waiting outside Winick's door?
The truth is that many old-school aldermen have been perfectly happy to run their wards and let the mayor run the city. They've signed off on all sorts of binge borrowing, budget gimmickry and short-sighted deals -- a 75-year parking meter lease, anyone? -- with rarely a nay vote.
When things went sour, they complained that they weren't given the time or the information to evaluate those proposals, which were presented as emergencies with no alternative solution. That conveniently relieved them of responsibility for unpopular decisions, or so they reasoned.
Two years ago, a group of hands-on aldermen decided they didn't want City Hall to do their thinking for them. Then and now, credit goes to Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, and Ald. Michele Smith, 43rd.
They recognized the challenges ahead. They wanted their own financial staff so they could push back, demand answers and suggest alternatives -- or at least to cast an informed vote. After they'd rounded up the votes to create the office, some of their colleagues tried to defund it because Emanuel found the money to pay for it by zeroing out an aldermanic slush fund.
But the office survived, and it will finally be filled. Now aldermen have no excuse for sitting on their hands until it's time to vote yea. The council won't magically become a partner in city finances by creating a small budget office, or by staffing it. But it's a step.
All of this reminds us of another unfinished reform: what to do about the legislative inspector general. Four years ago, the City Council created that job to quiet demands that it submit to oversight from City Hall's inspector general, Joe Ferguson.
Aldermen didn't give their IG the authority or the resources needed to do the job. (They took 18 months to fill that one, too.) Now they're angry with him for blowing through his budget investigating the petty offenses that fall within his job description.
The long-promised solution -- assigning the job to Ferguson after all -- had 35 sponsors in the last council and never got out of committee. A new version has been introduced, with 23 sponsors. Let's hope this one does more than gather dust.
