Hours after taking office, Mayor Lori Lightfoot signed an executive order stripping aldermen of their unbridled control over licensing and permitting in their wards.
On Saturday, the mayor’s decision to start delivering on the central promise of her corruption-fighting mayoral campaign came back to haunt the residents of Little Village.
Armed with a city demolition permit that local Ald. Mike Rodriguez (22nd) was powerless to block, a sub-contractor hired by Hilco Redevelopment Partners demolished a 95-year-old smoke stack at the site of a shuttered coal-fired power plant without abiding by the safety measures it had promised to implement.
That caused a giant plume of dust to rain down on the community, making it difficult to breathe during a coronavirus pandemic that does the same. Homes, vehicles, streets and sidewalks were left filthy.
On Tuesday, Rodriguez said he would have delayed the smokestack demolition if he could have and twice tried to do just that, only to be told by the city the project would proceed.
He now plans to introduce an ordinance after the fact requiring so-called “special-use permits” from the Zoning Board of Appeals before future large-scale demolitions.
“In that special-use permit, there will be much more strict guidelines and much more community engagement and aldermanic power,” said Rodriguez, who lives five blocks from the demolition site.
“I ran a non-profit organization for eight years. We were about organizing community members to take power. That’s what we need to empower here.”
Aldermen Brian Hopkins (2nd) and Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) couldn’t agree more.
They argue that Lightfoot’s decision to consolidate permitting power in the mayor’s office means she “owns” the Little Village debacle as much as she claims that Hilco does.
Hopkins noted that, during his first-term as alderman, he presided over “one the most extensive demolition projects” in Chicago’s history — on the site of the massive Lincoln Yards project.
That complex demolition included: Finkl Steel; a 100,000 square-foot fleet maintenance facility with more than 20 underground storage tanks filled with hazardous chemicals; a rubber recycling company; a tannery; and a variety of other large industrial structures.
“I was consulted every step of the way. Involved in the decision-making process. The dust mitigation, the environmental remediation, scheduling it at a time when it would be less disruptive to the neighborhood,” Hopkins said Tuesday.
“Contrast that with the way the city handled aldermanic involvement in this. Ald. Rodriguez was merely notified at the last minute. He wasn’t told he had veto authority. He wasn’t asked for permission. He was simply informed this was happening. It’s the exact opposite of what I went through.”
When Chicago finally returns to some semblance of normalcy, Hopkins said he hopes aldermen will be emboldened to take back the permitting powers Lightfoot stripped away.
“An alderman knows that he [or she] will be held responsible for negative consequences of any decision like this. So an alderman is going to approach it much more cautiously. ... We use our aldermanic authority to protect neighborhoods. That’s been taken away from us,” Hopkins said.
“When the COVID-19 crisis subsides and there’s no longer such extreme justification for mayoral authority to be solely concentrated in the hands of one person, we should go back to the way it’s always been in Chicago, where the people who are elected by and accountable to the neighbors are making decisions that affect the neighborhoods. We are not mere bystanders. ... We are deciding whether or not it will happen.”
The mayor’s office had no immediate comment.
Sigcho-Lopez argued Lightfoot’s decision to “centralize power” has had “unfortunate and shameful consequences” in Little Village. The same could happen with a concrete plant in his own ward that he is trying desperately to stop.
“She can try to point fingers all she wants. But at the end of the day, the departments issued the permit in the first place. She has to own this as much as Hilco owns this,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
Sigcho-Lopez replaced longtime Zoning Committee Chairman Danny Solis (25th), who wore a wire to help the feds build their corruption case against Ald. Edward Burke (14th) after Solis was confronted with his own alleged wrongdoing.
“I understand very clearly what is wrong with prerogative. I understand very clearly what corruption has done to our city. She campaigned and I campaigned on providing a better process and guidelines, but that’s not what happened here,” Sigcho-Lopez said.
“She’s taking more control and centralizing power. And clearly we can see in this case how the lack of accountability caused a shameful result. She cannot say there were no warnings. But they did not listen to the constituents.”
