Lightfoot Should Avoid Council War, Unleash A Watchdog With Teeth

Chicago mayors keep getting shorter.

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley was shorter than the appointed boss who came before him, the late Eugene Sawyer.

Rahm Emanuel was tinier than Daley, if only by a hair.

Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot — at 5-foot-1— needs to stand on a box to see over Emanuel’s mayoral podium.

That’s a fact. But it’s as arbitrary as the phony importance pundits have put on whether Lightfoot will get to decide which aldermen will run the City council’s most powerful committees.

Same goes for trumped up significance of whether Lightfoot will immediately put the kibosh on “aldermanic privilege,” a tradition that allows ward bosses to control permits, licenses and zoning decisions in the neighborhoods they serve.

That’s nothing but a bunch of hype ginned up by old-school political insiders and opinion writers obsessed with “Game of Thrones.”

It’s not a secret that Lightfoot doesn’t have the political muscle, organization and campaign war chest to beat the City Council into rubber-stamp submission.

She’s an inexperienced political outsider who can’t count on consistent support from a majority City Council voting bloc, at least not yet.

And that’s OK. It’s great, even.

COMMENTARY

It means Lightfoot isn’t walking into office as “the boss,” which is exactly how voters wanted it.

If veteran alderman successfully wrestle away control of City Council committees, Lightfoot hasn’t lost.

Aldermen should have a strong voice in city government that’s respected rather than controlled by the mayor’s office.

They deserve credit and blame for their decisions, which they didn’t get under Emanuel, who took all the arrows and kudos for legislation and budgets he bullied aldermen to endorse.

Lightfoot has promised to "blow up all the old concepts about using city government to profit oneself.”

Establishing herself as a boss and eliminating aldermanic privilege won’t be a cure-all for a City Hall culture of corruption that has landed 30 aldermen in jail.

What Chicago politics needs is sunshine, which the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the “best of disinfectants.”

Lightfoot’s campaign slogan promised she would “bring in the light” — and 73.7 percent of voters expect her to make good on that.

It’s time for the City Council to be forced — by a mayor executive order if necessary — to conduct the public’s business under the watchful eye of a well-funded, corruption-hunting inspector general empowered to conduct audits and subpoena their emails and phone records, among other things.

For too long, Chicago aldermen have been allowed to protect themselves from prying eyes.

In 2010, Ald. Edward Burke (14th) and former Ald. Richard Mell (33rd) cut a deal with Mayor Daley to dilute the inspector general’s authority by limiting investigations to allegations backed up by “signed and sworn” complaints, a detail that deters would-be whistleblowers. And the measure called for reporting all investigation findings to the city’s ethics board, which had never taken any action against an alderman.

Under Emanuel, aldermen in 2012 balked at city legislative inspector general Faisal Khan’s demand to see employee time sheets. They called Khan “a paper tiger who thinks he has teeth.” Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6th) told the Sun-Times fellow aldermen were “talking about curtailing his power — possibly by eliminating his position.”

Sawyer counts himself as one of several ward bosses who proudly abides by a City Hall no-snitch code.

After federal mole Ald. Danny Solis was outed for wearing a wire on City Hall colleagues, including Burke, who faces criminal charges for allegedly shaking down a business owner, Sawyer told Sun-Times City Hall reporter Fran Spielman that getting wired up is "not the way I was brought up."

"If I was caught doing something wrong, I'd just take my punishment, deal with the consequences . . . and keep my mouth shut," he said.

Is it any wonder why Chicago is the most corrupt city in America, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago study that found 1,731 public officials were convicted of corruption-related charges between 1976 and 2017? Or that public corruption costs Chicago taxpayers about $500 million a year — more than two-thirds of the city's projected 2020 budget shortfall.

As Chicago’s shortest mayor, Lightfoot is plenty tall enough to flip on the lights in City Hall backrooms accustomed to shadows.

More Chicago Stories from Mark Konkol:

• Stolen Signs, Homophobic Slurs Caught On Video In 6th Ward Race
• Mayoral Forum Question-Dodger Toni Preckwinkle Might Be A Cyborg
• Bully Preckwinkle Backed By 'Inept' Stroger After Awkward Hug
• Chicago City Hall No Longer A Place For A Boss Like Preckwinkle
• Foster-Bonner Makes Run-Off Against Rubber Stamp 6th Ward Boss
• Preckwinkle Disses Voters By Ditching Sun-Times Mayoral Debate
• The Lori Lightfoot I Know Blindsided Mayor Emanuel With The Truth
• Chicago Election Results Confirm Referendum On Emanuel's Failure
• Want Change Chicago? Vote Out Absentee, Rubber-Stamp Aldermen
• A Vote For Daley, Preckwinkle, Mendoza, Chico Is A Vote For Rahm
• 'Empire' Actor Doesn't Fib As Well As Chicago's Clout Candidates
• Is Chicago Crazy Enough To Elect Bill Daley, The Rahm Candidate?
• Don't Believe CTU Hype: Undecideds Could Shock Mayoral Status Quo
• Mendoza Rapid-Fire Tweets Sling Mud On Clout Candidates, Herself
• Chicago Mayoral Race Is Absurd And Nightmare If You Don't Wake Up
• Did Rahm's Failure, Solis' FBI Wire Make Chicago GOP Relevant?
• Mayoral Candidate Susana Mendoza Can't Be Taken Seriously Anymore
• Facts About Pay-To-Play Preckwinkle Help To Voters To Form Opinion
• Chicago Needs To Elect Bunch Of Snitches To Kill Code Of Silence
• Rahm's Podcast Isn't Practice For TV Gig; He Stinks On TV (VIDEO)
• Are You For 'Cockroaches' Or Reformers In Chicago Mayoral Race?
• Cash Connects 'Independent' Preckwinkle To 'Good Ol' Boys Club'
• Hmm, Mayor Candidate Bill Daley Doesn't Want To Dis Rahm Anymore

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the Chicagoland series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the forthcoming Showtime documentary "16 Shots" about the murder of Laquan McDonald.