The aldermanic menu program cherished by the City Council “perpetuates significant inequities between wards and underfunds residential street” resurfacing needs by nearly $229 million, Inspector General Joe Ferguson said Thursday.
Earlier this week, Mayor Lori Lightfoot shot down Ferguson’s renewed proposal to shift control over street resurfacing from the aldermanic menu program to professional engineers at the Chicago Department of Transportation.
“Aldermen do a number of things with their menu money that is in support of their communities. To shackle them and take that away doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever,” she said.
Undaunted or concerned that his recommendations had been misunderstood, Ferguson released yet another advisory Thursday urging Lightfoot to overhaul the menu program, even though the reform “touches a third rail of local politics.”
Based on 2015 menu pricing and CDOT’s “life cycle data,” Ferguson estimated that the city’s “residential infrastructure needs” totaled $312.8 million annually.
But, the menu program, which allocates $1.32 million a year to each alderman no matter how large a geographic area he or she represents, provides only $84 million a year, leaving a gap of $228.8 million that must be pursued through other sources, such as tax-increment-financing (TIF), Ferguson wrote.
The inspector general renewed his demand for a “long-term strategic approach to capital planning.” CDOT does no such long-term analysis to determine annual street resurfacing needs.
“While this report, like the public way follow-up, touches a third rail of local politics — the Aldermanic Menu Program — Chicago’s ever-mounting financial challenges make it even more urgent that the City adhere to fundamental principles of good governance,” Ferguson was quoted as saying.
“Today’s report brings into the mix an additional critical value: equity. The City’s management of residential street resurfacing is an infrastructure version of the ‘two Chicagos’ trend that OIG sees increasingly in its examination of municipal services and programs.”
Ferguson stressed that he’s not talking about abolishing the menu program. He’s simply challenging its “status quo operation, which effectively makes it impossible for the City to manage core infrastructure in a cost-effective and equitable manner.”
“We urge the new administration to examine the issues and recommendations raised, with fresh eyes, and to dedicate itself to reducing inequities in capital spending,” he wrote.
Ferguson made a similar claim two years ago.
Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel responded by saying that following Ferguson’s recommendation would be like declaring war on a City Council that had walked the tax plank twice to solve Chicago’s $30 billion pension crisis and whose support the mayor needed going forward.
“Everybody who’s never actually worked in government said, ‘Let’s get rid … of earmarks. And ever since you got rid of earmarks, Congress has become totally, 100 percent dysfunctional,” Emanuel, who served as former President Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff, said then.
“If you sit around and walk around with a glass of white wine, you can say, ‘This is what the perfect world is.’”
