June 05--Mayor Rahm Emanuel has named four new members of the board of the City Colleges of Chicago, including an official from a labor union that supported his re-election bid.
Among the four new members of the board that oversees the seven-campus junior college system will be Karen Kent, president of the Unite Here Local 1 hospitality workers union. During Emanuel's campaign, Unite Here ran a series of ads titled "Rahm Love," which featured union members talking about how, according to the labor group, "Rahm's tough love approach has produced real results for them."
The ad campaign was helpful to Emanuel as he sought to counter opponents' claims he represented the interests of wealthy Chicagoans as well as his own rocky history with segments of organized labor.
Joining Kent on the City Colleges board will be financial adviser Isaac "Sandy" Goldman, who has made $45,300 in political contributions to Emanuel, according to state campaign finance records. The mayor previously appointed Goldman to the Illinois Medical District Commission.
The other new appointees are Charles "Chuck" Middleton, who will retire as president of Roosevelt University on June 30, according to the mayor's office, and Gary Gardner, president and co-founder of private equity firm PFG.
They will replace Paula Wolff, Ellen Alberding, Everett Rand and Larry Rogers Sr.
Emanuel launched a "colleges to careers" program at City Colleges in his first term, tying each campus to a particular industry in a bid to help students with degrees from the schools get jobs in those fields. And last year, he announced the Chicago Star scholarship program, which will cover the costs of tuition, fees and books to one of the City Colleges "pathway programs" for Chicago Public Schools graduates who have at least a 3.0 GPA and are academically ready for college-level math and English courses.
The new appointments are just the latest changes in key staffing for Emanuel as he heads into his second term.
The changes at the City Colleges board come days after Emanuel also replaced four members of his hand-picked Chicago school board that's at the center of a federal investigation into a no-bid contract it gave out.
He also recently named Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and onetime Mayor Richard M. Daley troubleshooter, to chair the Chicago Police Board, the civilian body that issues rulings in cases in which the superintendent of police files administrative charges against an officer and recommends that the officer be fired or suspended for 31 days or more.
jebyrne@tribpub.com
