EXCLUSIVE: Aldermen Angle To Organize Council Without Lightfoot

CHICAGO — Like 73.7 percent of Chicago voters, I slept like a rock election night and woke up relieved knowing that Toni Preckwinkle won’t succeed Rahm Emanuel as mayor.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about Lori Lightfoot, too. Her campaign for change touched people. I think she'll become a great mayor. But there’s no denying her landslide victory also reflected a citywide rejection of Preckwinkle and Chicago’s corrupt political status quo.

Veteran aldermen reminded me of that on Wednesday.

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While Lightfoot made a post-election victory lap, a collection of ward bosses quietly started angling to establish a City Council voting bloc strong enough to push back against the mayor-elect, City Hall sources said.

“Come on, now, we know the election was anti-Toni, not ‘We want Lori.’ And that makes this new territory. She’s going to be a weak mayor. And we’re not going to be dictated to. We’re going to make this a strong City Council like it was designed to be,” one ward boss told me.

“She’s in a very vulnerable position. She doesn’t have the fear factor, strong relationships or the resources to do what Rahm did coming in. And there’s no way she’s got 26 votes lined up.”

Twenty-six is the magic number of votes Lightfoot needs to push her legislative agenda through the City Council.

Early whispers indicate that as many as 32 aldermen have expressed interest in joining forces to appoint their own City Council committee chairmen and floor leader without the mayor-elect’s input.

A City Hall source told Patch that Ald. Ed Burke, who faces federal corruption charges for allegedly shaking down a Burger King owner, is pulling strings behind the scenes in attempt to orchestrate a modern version of the Council Wars voting bloc that stifled stifled the agenda of Chicago’s last progressive mayor, the late Harold Washington.

"This is what Burke does," the source said. "He has been actively trying to cultivate people saying, 'Hey, you know you don't have to be weak, blah, blah, blah. It's got his fingerprints all over it."

On Thursday, Lightfoot said she understands she'll meet some resistance in the City Council, but she's ready for it.

"I know some people will try to treat me like a substitute teacher to see how far they can get away with things, but I haven't gotten this far in life by being foolish and naive," Lightfoot said. "I'm going to govern with openness, transparency and accountability in partnership in people and groups and not in opposition to them."

Chicago political expert and former alderman Dick Simpson said he doesn’t expect early aldermanic push for a stronger City Council to elevate to Washington-era legislative gridlock.

“With Emanuel’s floor leader [Ald.] Pat O’Connor defeated and [Ald.] Ed Burke tied up with a criminal case there’s no leader of the old guard,” Simpson said.

“Lightfoot is going to have get support from a combination of progressive aldermen and other allies. But I think she’ll be able to work with a majority of aldermen.”

Simpson says the lack of a defined blueprint could give Lightfoot an opportunity to quickly bring about major changes — at least for a while.

“Her priority will be to have a strong majority to get the traditional first 100 days of passing laws and moving forward her agenda," he said. "But that support won’t be set in stone.”

One alderman put it this way: “When Rahm's gone we’re done having downtown telling us what to do. We’re going to play nice with Lori until she tries to change our committee chairs and take away aldermanic prerogative. If she takes time to cultivate relationships, listen to us and govern that way, she can be successful.”

Lightfoot said she's calling on aldermen to "look beyond their own narrow ward interests and be ready to engage helping address and solve larger citywide issues that require robust legislative involvement."

"What the bottom line has been is [for aldermen] to cede all power and all the responsibility to the mayor's office. I’m not a person who’s afraid of exercising power but it would be better for our city if the city council was a willing partner to share both the burden and the reward," the mayor-elect said in a telephone interview. "So I intend to challenge them to do just that. For some of them that will mean going out of their comfort zone but for others it is going to be a welcome change."

When it comes to her promise to end the City Hall tradition of giving ward bosses unchecked authority over local zoning and permits, she's not changing her position.

"I'm ready to take on that fight. Aldermanic prerogative is an overwhelming corruptive influence and it must change. It's not a thing — it's not in the law — but it's a strong powerful custom that has to give way to the new way of doing business. It has had a stranglehold on everything about Chicago ... and it has to change. And I'm going to do everything I can to change it."

A veteran City Hall insider said Lightfoot made it clear during the campaign that she's not interested in micro-managing the City Council like Emanuel, who had a reputation for bullying ward bosses and stuffing campaign war chests to get his way. But ward bosses should take heed, the mayor-elect isn't a pushover and voters put her in an unprecedented position for a political outsider.

“We’re looking at an entirely new form of government. What happened in this election goes against the history of modern Chicago politics. There’s no boss, and it doesn’t look like she wants to be a boss. It all goes back to winning 73.7 percent of the vote. Voters expect her to blow it up. They handed her dynamite and said do what you need to do."

Lightfoot said aldermen who view the election results as an anti-Preckwinkle mandate are missing the mark.

"I’m coming in with a very profound mandate for change. It's what I ran on. It's what the voters embraced. The notion that this almost 50 percent margin of victory was anti-Toni is not being particularly sophisticated in reading the moment," Lightfoot said.

"This is a big, huge moment, in bold, underscore, use the largest font size. ... And they need to understand that this isn't about me proving myself to them. It's about me proving myself to 300,000 people who vote for change in every ward. ... What they need to be thinking about is how can they be true to the overwhelming mandate we received. They need to be worried about that."

Lightfoot says she knows reform won't come easy.

"I’m not naive. The Machine was built to last. It's not dead, but it's in a death spiral," she said. "And I intend to bury it forever and make it a complete relic of history."

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 about the murder of Laquan McDonald, who Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot 16 times until the black teenager was dead.