Entries associated with the tag "Bob Fioretti":

Aldermen did actually debate for a couple of hours before they voted on Mayor Daley's 2009 budget, but not about whether it should be approved—that was a foregone conclusion under the pressures of an imploding economy, a domineering mayor, and a shortage of alternative ideas, as the 49-1 head count eventually showed. So instead they went back and forth about what was wrong with it even though it had to be passed.

Sixth Ward alderman Freddrenna Lyle described it as a “bad-news budget” but said the council had fought for and won important revisions since the mayor introduced it last month. “We’ve done our homework,” she said. But the Fourth Ward’s Toni Preckwinkle didn’t think she and her colleagues had done enough homework. She called for an additional week of budget hearings next year. “How can we run through 40 departments in two weeks?” she asked. “I don’t think it leads to a very thoughtful process.”

And so it went on issues large and small. Ray Suarez (31st) said he still didn’t like the new fee for dumpsters, which essentially taxes businesses and multi-unit apartment dwellers, but he was grateful that a newly formed council subcommittee would discuss it further and possibly replace it in the coming months. Helen Shiller (46th) then urged Suarez and everybody else to broaden the dumpster discussions to include the city’s recycling and waste management policies. Scott Waguespack (32nd) said this budget was the best the city could do in dire times, but ripped the administration for poorly managing department mergers and not planning ahead; he was followed by George Cardenas (12th), who lauded the administration for being smart and responsible. Howard Brookins (21st) praised the atmosphere of cooperation that had led to a plan to reduce layoffs; Bob Fioretti (2nd) demanded that the administration work more collaboratively with aldermen next year. While Richard Mell (33rd) lamented the demise of the old industrial economy, Manny Flores (1st) encouraged everyone to work on building a new green one. Mary Ann Smith (48th) blamed the federal and state governments for not doing enough to stanch the economic bleeding, but to James Balcer (11th) the real problem is the country’s addiction to foreign oil.

The lone nay vote came from 26th Ward alderman Billy Ocasio. “Yes, these are hard times, but I think in this budget we haven’t been that responsible,” he said. Ocasio was angry that the city could find money for Millennium Park and the 2016 Olympics bid but not for communities like his, and he accused the administration of axing productive low-level workers instead of unnecessary middle managers. “For the reasons mentioned—the wrong people being laid off, my community being taken for granted, all the false promises, and the fact that this administration believes that everything and everyone is expendable—I vote no.”

It was, ironically, almost the exact opposite of—or, given the spirit of the times, the perfect complement to—a speech Shiller had delivered a few minutes earlier. For several years in the late 1990s she was the one who cast the lone no vote on Mayor Daley’s budgets, but this time she made a plea for collaboration and dialog during the rotten economic climate. “Often the City Council is looked as a body, that if we all vote one way or another, it’s a rubber stamp,” she said. “But that doesn’t fit the times.”

Not surprisingly, no members of the council argued that it was, in fact, a rubber stamp, and, amid the usual political rhetoric about how it might be the media's fault but it certainly wasn't theirs, they found common ground on several other critical issues. They repeatedly reminded each other that real live people across the city are losing their jobs and their homes and feeling desperate. They agreed that this is nothing short of a disaster, and they agreed that, frighteningly, next year will probably be worse.

In a press conference Wednesday, Mayor Daley announced that the city, state, and feds, with help from corporate and nonprofit donors, had come up with more than $100 million in assistance for people who’ll need help covering and reducing heating bills this winter.

But he also said that several business leaders had recently told him they were planning major layoffs over the coming months. "If everything goes we’ll be close to a depression," Daley said. "That’s a frightening word to say, but we’ve been in a recession. Washington doesn’t want to admit we’re in a recession, I don’t know why, but everything’s collapsing."

Businesses and governments across the country are struggling to figure out how to pay their bills, Daley noted, making his point with an extended metaphor that ended up sounding like he was wishing he could sail away from it all. "I think everybody’s in the same boat. No one’s outside the boat. Everyone’s in the boat—that’s one thing they are. Your industry, government, everybody—except the federal government. They print money."

With something of a cross between a sigh, a whine, and a boast, he added: "We have to balance our budget by law."

Daley wasn’t saying anything he and countless others hadn’t said before, but as always there was a political purpose behind his musings: he was telling the city, starting with its aldermen, that his team’s financial plans are as good as it gets; in these tough times, it’s important to come together and do as he says.

"No one’s happy," he said after being reminded that aldermen didn’t like his proposed layoffs or cuts in service and infrastructure. "No one’s happy."

The City Council had just finished a meeting called primarily to advance the Daley administration’s 2009 budget proposal so it could get a final council vote next Wednesday. That happened according to plan, but off the council floor some aldermen were vowing to … stay really pissed off about it.

Aldermen have been grumbling about the budget since it was introduced a few weeks ago. But few have come up with serious counterproposals, and not until the last few days did it really seem to sink in that, rotten economy or not, they’re going to be the ones who take a public beating if more people find their cars booted, their garbage piling up, or their alleys falling apart. The grousing turned to outright bitching when it became clear that cuts would also be imposed on aldermanic menu budgets—the $1.3 million pots of money each gets to spend on handpicked ward improvements. Suddenly the whole budgetary process became an issue of "respect," as longtime northwest-side boss Richard Mell put it earlier this week. And he didn’t seem any happier during the rather succinct exchange we had Wednesday.

MICK: So is the budget going forward now?

MELL: Who knows.

MICK: Have you gotten the respect you want?

MELL: No.

Not to worry—I found a few other aldermen who were more conversational in explaining that, yes, it's true, the whole thing’s really a pisser.  

"The economy is bad, and you don’t get all those amenities you want because the economy is so bad, but in the final analysis you’ve got to have a budget, and one of the responsibilities of the City Council is to produce a budget … and you do the best you can with what you’ve got," said 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith. "I’m hoping for the best, but I’m expecting the worst."

"First of all, we all know that next year’s just going to be worse—so where are the layoffs going to be?" wondered the Second Ward’s Bob Fioretti. "What will be the cuts? Are we then going to move into the TIF funding? We don’t have any other items that we can lease, so how are we going to move government along? We need to come up with a comprehensive analysis." He wisely wouldn’t swear this would happen in the next seven days.

Michael Zalewski, alderman of the 23rd Ward, said he and several other aldermen were going to get together Wednesday afternoon to talk about possibly raising the gas tax and finding ways to reduce layoffs. "We’re going to go brainstorm now," he said.

Here’s the good news: Mayor Daley believes that, with your help and a few dozen aye votes from the City Council, he can keep Chicago moving forward.

Here’s the bad news: Because of the imploding economy, not even staff cuts, new taxes and fee increases, reduced services, and additional leasing of public assets—and, if you can believe it, not even a doubling of library fines—are likely to fix the city’s budget problems. Even in the best circumstances, city officials project deficits of at least $200 million a year through 2012.

That, in essence, was the message of the mayor’s annual budget address, delivered to an overflow crowd in council chambers Wednesday morning. It prompted a standing ovation.

"I have confidence that over the long term American’s economy will rebound," Daley said. "It may take time, but we’ll get there. Until then, like every family, we must continue to manage our city budget with a slow economy in mind."

To that end, the mayor proposed several ways to cut spending—and a few more ways to bring in revenue that in previous years was generated by various real estate, sales, and property taxes now in rapid decline. Among the highlights, or lowlights, depending on your perspective: 929 city employee pink slips and 1,350 vacancies that won’t be filled; the consolidation of several city departments; diversion of some of the Midway lease proceeds, and anticipated cash from leasing city parking meters, to general operating funds; dismissal—that’s right—for city employees who don’t "do a day’s work for a day’s pay"; refinancing existing debt; hiking certain parking fees and raising taxes on entertainment and private-sector garbage collection; service shutdowns for six days around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. The city will also cut funding for free downtown trolley rides and the jumping jack program for kids, and library scofflaws can expect to pay twice as much in fines.

The budget proposal, Daley said, “improves management, minimizes reductions in services, and maintains funding for public safety while still investing in neighborhood infrastructure to keep Chicago moving forward.”

Translation: in these tough times, when just about every governmental entity in the country is scrambling to piece together a survival plan, the mayor and his staff were smart enough to include a few party favors in theirs that will be hard for aldermen to resist. Millions from the Midway deal will be poured into the ward menu program, which allows aldermen to spend money on whatever capital improvements they choose. Ever-increasing pots of TIF money will continue to be doled out to finance other pet projects. Daley says he'll lobby the federal government for a jobs program that will help all of Chicago.

Without dropping his name, the mayor even made a pledge to his on-again, off-again critic James Meeks—who as far as I could tell wasn’t physically in the building—by vowing to pressure Springfield to reform the school funding system.

"If we work together and avoid the bickering that has divided the federal government and other cities and states attempting to pass their budgets, we’ll be taking an important step toward addressing the financial challenges we face," Daley said.

Aldermen may have stood and applauded the mayor afterward, but nobody could pretend to be happy about what he’d said. Some of the out-and-out skeptics, like Bob Fioretti, Pat Dowell, and Scott Waguespack, wondered why some of the "management improvements" hadn’t been implemented already if they were such great ideas. "We plan six months ahead; other cities have five and six-year plans," said Waguespack. "There’s no way you can say you didn’t see some of this coming."

Even stalwart allies said their constituents didn’t want to hear about slowed or reduced service—they wanted more trash pickup and tree-trimming, not less. Not that anyone had better ideas than the mayor’s. And all could acknowledge that desperate times call for desperate measures. Before a phalanx of TV cameras, 31st Ward alderman Ray Suarez held up a copy of the 611-page budget proposal and made a pledge that would have been unthinkable, or at least unutterable, in many of the flush years past: "We are going to have to look closely at this thing."

Hearings start next Monday at 10 AM in council chambers; they're open to the public.

Evidence that the agenda for Wednesday’s City Council meeting was relatively light could be found in the first question asked of Mayor Daley at a press conference afterward.

"Mr. Mayor, Alderman Fioretti has proposed a ban on metal baseball bats at Park District facilities and the schools because of the injuries that seem to be more prevalent with baseballs hit from those bats. What do you think of that?"

The mayor seemed to be prepared for this question and didn’t hesitate before looking right at the reporter and answering. "Well, I think especially they’re going to be looking at the number of lawsuits that get filed with things like that. Like with anything else you have to be careful with what type of things you’re using. You know, baseball. So you have to look at it very carefully."

Several of the journalists cast questioning looks at each other. One decided to ask for clarification: Does that mean the mayor would support an ordinance like this?

"Well, I don’t know. You have to find out. You don’t want any child to be injured, so you have to look at it very carefully."

The mayor called on someone else.

“Alderman Burke wants to ban texting while driving,” the reporter said. “What do you think of that?”

Granted, all but about a half hour of the two-hour council meeting had been taken up by speeches honoring local Olympic athletes and the heroic deeds of police officers and firefighters, with the last 30 minutes reserved for aye votes on bonds, zoning amendments, traffic regulations, and the like. But it’s not as if the city doesn’t have any problems that need addressing, and in the council lounge many of the aldermen who weren’t talking up Barack Obama’s chances were quietly discussing the city’s lousy budget prognosis and wondering how much they would have to cut or tax.

In August budget officials predicted Chicago’s deficit would grow to hundreds of millions of dollars by the end of next year and vowed to keep every option for confronting it on the table. Aldermen say they’ve only been told to expect layoffs as well as delays or cancellations of their menu items--the alley repaving, traffic light installations, and other small capital projects they select on their own. They obviously aren’t happy about either possibility, since they expect the layoffs to delay service delivery and the postponements to reduce opportunities for impressing voters. One is even murmuring about asking Mayor Daley to cut some of his own beloved programs, like flower planting.

So far, though, city officials haven’t said what they intend to do, and while the mayor shared lots of ideas about lots of issues at his press conference, he didn’t say squat about dealing with the budget shortfall.

"You can’t be using your phone while driving," he said in firm support, more or less, of the proposed text-messaging ban. “So whatever, you can’t, no, especially using one-hand driving is very dangerous.”

Another reporter asked Daley what he thought of the possibility of the state leasing the lottery for an infusion of cash. Amid a lengthy analysis of the U.S. economy, the mayor said it was probably a good idea. "This is a very difficult economy, and it’s not going away for a couple of years. That’s the prediction of all the economists. It’s going to be a long, long, tough economy, and next year’s going to be even worse. So I have always thought that if you have a public asset [pdf] that can be used for infrastructure purposes, about putting people back to work in businesses like that, I think it’s very, very important. . . . You can’t spend money if you don’t have money. The only people who do that is the federal government. They print it. That’s why we’re really in jeopardy in this economy—they print money and they just print money and they keep printing it and that’s why the value is less and less every year. . . ."

Daley said he wasn’t worried that the O’Hare expansion project had been delayed by a court battle; he was confident that it would clear its final legal hurdles soon. On the other hand—"Well, I’m worried about the Sox,” the mayor said. “I mean, you worry about the Sox, losing two games yesterday.”

And the Cubs? "The Cubs have a good team. You know, they play small ball. They’re in a drought now, but look at their record. They’ve done a tremendous job all year. We’ve been up and down, the Sox. This is not good."

Are the Cubs going to choke again? "No, I don’t think so."

Another reporter tried to break in: "Alderman Suarez wants to—"

But Daley wasn’t done. “Because they’ve been playing smart ball—good pitching, hitting, and defense. I mean, they’re not hitting the home runs. They’re hitting singles and doubles and they’re scoring.”

What about Chicago’s budget problems—any progress or new ideas coming to the forefront? "Oh yeah, you better believe it," he said. "Chicago, every city, every town."

Right. . . . Well, what is the city considering?

"You know your budget problems are your own. Cutbacks, layoffs, you know it’s going to get worse every year. So we’re in the same dilemma. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to get worse and worse. . . . We are in a recession. I know the politicians in Washington don’t want to tell you that, but we are in a recession. . . . "

Next question. "The real estate transfer tax is down, as you pointed out in your preliminary budget, but now Alderman Burke is proposing no longer trying to tax transactions that are within divorce proceedings where one spouse gives up property to another spouse. Do you think that should continue to be taxed?"

Daley’s face contorted in disgust before he emitted a high-pitched noise that sounded something like"Yeeeh, yunnett!"

"But he says it’s an unfair penalty when there’s a divorce, which is emotionally wrenching and financially draining enough."

The mayor regained his composure. "Lawyers are all taken care of. Remember that: the lawyers are all taken care of in a divorce."

"But if they’ve already paid once, why should the spouses, the divorced spouses, pay twice?"

"They can take it out of their lawyer’s fee."

Clearly pleased with his answer, Daley began walking away from the podium. But one last question was shouted after him: Had he been following the "lipstick on a pig" controversy?

The mayor slowed up for a second. “Be very careful about what you say in public,” he said.

Who says the City Council doesn’t do anything except rubber stamp the mayor’s agenda and pass toothless resolutions praising cops and high school football champions? Sure, aldermen did all this today, but they also got at least seven other ithings done:

(1) Four months after consenting to tens of millions in property tax hikes, the council enthusiastically passed a resolution sponsored by budget committee chairman Carrie Austin urging home owners to contact the city’s Tax Assistance Center for help in determining if they can find a way to reduce their bills.

(2) The council unanimously voted in favor of creating two more TIF districts while the mayor proposed a third.

(3) Ed Burke's proposal to ban trans fats died long ago, but today he introduced an ordinance that would require fast food restaurants to display the calorie content of the food they serve. “Diabetes is raging in America. People need to change their lifestyles and change their habits, and people need to be aware of this,” he said. He shrugged off the possibility that people already have a hunch that Whoppers aren’t good for them, saying “You have to start someplace."

(4) Second Ward alderman Bob Fioretti appeared stunned at the succession of reporters who wanted to talk to him about his ordinance that would ban the small plastic bags often used by drug dealers. “Can you believe it?” he asked, shaking his head. Fioretti later agreed to hold the item because a couple of his colleagues wanted to look it over more carefully, but it’s all but a sure thing at the next meeting: “Even the big guy is saying, ‘Yeah, we ought to ban those things,’” Fioretti said, nodding toward the mayor.

(5) The aldermen agreed the city should pay $195,000 to a public housing resident who said police falsely arrested him and threatened him with a running chainsaw in 2004. They signed off on another settlement, for $190,000, to an 80-year-old woman who says she and her grandson were roughed up by police during an illegal search of their apartment in 2006.

(6) Without pause or comment the council signed off on Daley’s reappointments of two CTA board members for new six-year terms. Those are the guys who overseeing governance of the transit system that aldermen have repeatedly complained about and mayor himself recently called “costly and inefficient.”

(7) They celebrated—with cake—the 100th birthday of former alderman Leon Despres, who was often a lone voice of independence during the reign of the first Mayor Daley. A succession of aldermen who have little in common with Despres other than the title stood and praised him. “I suspect we have never had such an erudite member of this body,” said Burke. “I wish I could have had the distinguished career of Len Despres,” said 50th Ward alderman Berny Stone. “A lot of people could learn from someone who sticks to what he believes in like Len Depres,” said 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell.

Aldermen Ed Smith, Walter Burnett, and Bob Fioretti got together this morning and called it a meeting of the City Council's committee on health. The one item on their agenda was consideration of a proposed ordinance imposing the latest Chicago prohibition: a ban on self-sealing plastic baggies smaller than two inches square that are often used to package drugs on the street. 

Second-Ward alderman Fioretti, the chief sponsor of the proposal, conceded that outlawing the baggies probably wouldn't bring down the drug trade. But he argued that governments should do all they can to annoy and inconvenience it.

"I do believe the ongoing fight we have against drugs and gangs in our neighborhoods has to be approached on all levels, including some of the smallest levels we see," he said. "We want our streets to be safe, we want our kids to be safe, and we need to take the right kind of steps for it."

Twenty-seventh Ward alderman Burnett looked a little uneasy. "I signed onto this ordinance because I think we have to do everything we can to save lives and get drugs off our streets," he said. Then he added that he had a few misgivings about it.

"I was just outside talking to someone and I didn’t think about it until he said it, but generally when I get a brand-new suit, a lot of times they have extra buttons in plastic bags that they leave on the inside pocket," he said. "And I’m just concerned about legitimate legal people being put in a--"

"Well, first of all, as you know, in most of the suits that you buy, the bags are stapled and not self-sealing," Fioretti said. The ordinance, Fioretti pointed out, would impose a $1,500 fine on anyone who possesses the small baggies "under circumstances where one reasonably should know" they're going to be used for transporting or selling narcotics.

"So it is a little different here," Fioretti said. "And drug dealers, when they’re selling drugs, they won’t be having buttons in their bags."

"I just want to make sure that we don't--how do you say it?--bite off your head in spite of your nose or whatever," Burnett said. 

Fioretti, Smith, and a narcotics specialist from the police department assured him that wouldn't happen. A few minutes later Burnett moved that the committee approve the proposal and send it to the full council for consideration. The vote in favor was unanimous.

Howard Brookins Jr. was an attorney who represented victims of police abuse before he was elected to the City Council from the independent-minded 21st Ward in 2003. But after Mayor Daley watched the City Council reject Brookins's plans to bring a Wal-Mart to the ward, the alderman seemed to retreat into a strange "me-against-the-world" political philosophy, railing against unions and supporters of the big-box minimum-wage ordinance while also antagonizing Daley. He almost proudly told reporters the story of how the mayor had threatened him for backing a couple of independent aldermanic candidates on the south side. "I'll see you on the battlefield," he said Daley told him. 

Then Brookins was forced into a runoff with a labor-backed challenger--and accepted Daley's endorsement and more than $40,000 from a Daley-affiliated PAC. He held on to his seat.

So Brookins surprised a lot of observers yesterday when he cut off Ike Carothers, the Daley yes-man who chairs the council's police and fire committee, as Carothers began to introduce the mayor's plan to give himself control over the Office of Professional Standards, the body responsible for investigating police misconduct.

Currently OPS is housed within the police department--which only makes sense to those who remember that it was created because allegations of police abuse were once investigated by the department's Internal Affairs division, which reported to the police chief, which reported to the first Mayor Daley. That didn't work.

Neither does OPS in its current form. This Mayor Daley now agrees, even though he's the one who appoints the person who nominally runs it, and that person only runs it as long as the mayor says so. That's how every other public agency in Chicago works, and it's how OPS works as well. 

In that respect, maybe it wasn't as bold as it appeared for Brookins, backed by mayoral annoyance Joe Moore and newbies Bob Fioretti and Pat Dowell, to move to "defer and publish" the OPS reform proposal. That puts off any action on it until at least the next full council meeting on July 19.

In an interview immediately after the move, Brookins insisted that Daley's willingness to talk about any reform of OPS was "a huge step" that Brookins would never have thought possible when he was a rookie four years earlier.

Fioretti, a trial lawyer who has represented people wrongfully convicted, strode up to Brookins's side and joined the interview with more pointed language: "I do think we need a clearly independent body--taking it from the police department to the mayor's office is not sufficient," he said. 

Channel 7's Andy Shaw then directly asked Brookins if the aldermen were saying that Daley has too poor a track record--as mayor and as the state's attorney who did nothing about police torture under former commander Jon Burge--to be responsible for the agency that polices the police. 

"I don't know if I'd go that far," Brookins said, but added: "Clearly we have seen throughout the time that Mayor Daley has been mayor that there have still been police officers who have had problems in the past that we may have been able to stop, and the city has then been liable for millions of dollars. We have to send a clear message here."   

Daley would later scoff at the notion that he shouldn't be the one to oversee OPS directly, saying, "Who should it be--the pope? . . . Who are you going to give it to, an alderman?" Yet he claimed he wasn't upset about the delay, calling it part of the legislative process.

The truth is that Daley isn't used to following a legislative process that involves aldermen defying him, even for a month. And he certainly doesn't like it.

As Brookins and Fioretti were talking to reporters, Daley aide Lance Lewis, one of the few straight shooters I've met in the mayor's administration, was standing in the middle of the throng with a recorder that captured every word they said. "When I take notes, I can't read my own writing," he explained. I asked why anyone from the mayor's office needed to write down OR record what aldermen were saying to the press. "Well, if the mayor gets asked questions about it, he needs to be prepared."

This one, Lance, I can't buy. The mayor's press conference was held within a half hour, and it seemed pretty unlikely that anyone was going to transcribe the Brookins-Fioretti interviews in time for the mayor to review them. 

Almost lost amid the OPS frenzy was another council move: approving the Daley administration's plan to expedite the process for selecting public art, putting most of the decision-making process in the hands of aldermen and itself. 

Despite weeks of controversy (scroll down) over the measure, including a defer-and-publish move at the last council meeting by First Ward alderman Manny Flores and the 22nd Ward's Ricardo Munoz, it passed yesterday without a single word of debate.

On the one hand, for the first time since I've been attending council meetings, the roll call began with five straight "no" votes--from aldermen Flores, Fioretti, Dowell, Toni Preckwinkle, and Leslie Hairston. Nays were also cast by rookies Sandi Jackson (7th Ward), Scott Waguespack (32nd), and Brendan Reilly (42nd) as well as veterans Munoz, Moore, and Rey Colon (35th).

On the other, 38 aldermen, including union-backed newcomers Toni Foulkes (15th) and Joann Thompson (16th), voted with the administration, and 43rd Ward alderman Vi Daley courageously skipped the vote altogether. It struck me as a possible preview of the vote on the OPS reforms and a whole lot of other administration policies over the next few years.

Later, when the mayor was asked if the 11 "no" votes bothered him, he engaged in a classic Daley deflection. "No, I think public art is really important in Chicago," he said. "I think we need more of it."

"Right, but they don't like the way you're going to choose the artists," said Fran Spielman of the Sun-Times.

"I'm not choosing the artists. I'm not choosing the artists. [Cultural Affairs commissioner] Lois Weisberg is," Daley said. "We have more public art in Chicago than in most cities in the country. If you look at our public art, it's all over. I mean, it's really fantastic . . . "

After several more minutes, the question was pressed again, this time at a much higher volume: Were you concerned with the 11 no votes?

"No," Daley said. "No, no." He hurried out of the room.

There's a largely unspoken reason why many experts think Bob Fioretti will unseat Second Ward alderman Madeline Haithcock in the April 17 runoff. It has to do with the dismal history of race and politics in Chicago.

Traditionally the Second was a solidly black ward. Running south from the Loop along the lake to about 35th Street, it was represented by significant figures in local political history, including Oscar DePriest, the city's first black alderman. But after two decades of gentrification, more and more whites have moved south of the Loop, changing the ward's demographics.

In part to protect her incumbency, Haithcock, who's black, had the City Council alter the ward's boundaries in the 2001 redistricting, building a west-side extension that roughly cuts between Harrison and Lake all the way to Sacramento. 

Last year Haithcock tried to woo these new constituents with a proposal to rename a stretch of Monroe Street "Fred Hampton Way" in tribute to the former Black Panther leader slain in his sleep by police in 1969. In the face of fierce opposition from the Fraternal Order of Police, however, Haithcock abandoned that proposal, acknowledging she didn't have enough support to overcome opposition from white aldermen. In the end she wound up alienating some residents of both races, looking needlessly provocative to one group and cowardly to the other.

In February's aldermanic election neither Haithcock nor Fioretti did particularly well in the west-side precincts, where former 27th Ward alderman Wallace Davis took more than 35 percent of the vote. Overall, Davis finished last in the field of six candidates, pulling hardly any support from the ward's south side, where voters either weren't familiar with him or were turned off by his having served four years in federal prison for taking bribes and kickbacks during his 80s term as alderman. But he still oversees two dozen or so precinct captains on the west side.

So which candidate will the west-side vote go to this time around? If history's any clue, more blacks will vote for Fioretti than whites for Haithcock: black voters have always been more willing to vote for the opposite race than whites when it comes to aldermanic elections. In fact, I can't think of a single black aldermanic candidate in recent history who's defeated a white opponent in a ward that wasn't overwhelmingly black.    

My prediction: Fioretti will win all the white South Loop precincts and Haithcock the black south-side ones, making Wallace Davis a potential if somewhat unlikely kingmaker.

Sure enough, Davis says both candidates have come calling for his endorsement. For the moment, he hasn't decided which one he (and his precinct workers) will bless.  

Clearly, we’re down to the final hours before the election:

• 50th Ward alderman Bernard Stone, who is Jewish, has recently been suggesting that his opponents are making anti-Semitic remarks when they accuse him of helping his “friends” with zoning changes. Over the weekend he reported that someone sent him a copy of one of his mailings with a swastika scribbled over his picture.

• Naisy Dolar, one of Stone’s challengers, said the race is shifting her way and announced plans for a celebration party. But it won't be in the ward, or even in the city—it'll take place in Skokie.

• The Second Ward’s Madeline Haithcock let it be known that Bob Fioretti, one of her most aggressive challengers, once had an order of protection issued against him; Fioretti said it was requested by a woman who had been harassing him and was lifted a week later.

• Arenda Troutman, the embattled 20th Ward alderman, alleges that employees of The Woodlawn Organization, one of the most powerful institutions in her ward, have been destroying her campaign signs. 

• 46th Ward challenger James Cappleman distributed a flyer over the weekend featuring a map of the ward color-coded by the alleged turf of eight different street gangs. “Don’t you think your alderman should work with police and the community to target gang activity?” it asks. After 20 years, let's move gangs our of your neighborhood." Alderman Helen Shiller has been in office 20 years.

• Don Gordon, an opponent of 49th Ward alderman Joe Moore and his ban on the sale of foie gras, attended a “Freedom of Choice” dinner Sunday night featuring the delicacy. “If I were in the City Council, we wouldn't have a kneejerk reaction about this,"he said. Animal rights demonstrators picketed the event and vowed to volunteer for Moore Tuesday.

• While Mayor Daley felt comfortable enough to take the day off from the campaign Sunday, his challengers have been out talking to anyone who will listen. Dock Walls took time Monday morning to be interviewed live on Columbia College’s TV news program, which only shows on campus.

• Meanwhile, the Reverend Al Sampson, who was a key organizer for Harold Washington, has joined with several dozen other African-American ministers and political activists to distribute more than 300,000 copies of a flyer listing the 2007 “Soul Slate.” It endorses Dorothy Brown for mayor and, for City Council, black aldermen and challengers who haven’t received significant support from the Fraternal Order of Police or the Service Employees International Union. Among them: Haithcock, Tillman, Darcel Beavers (7th), Shirley Coleman (16th), Howard Brookins Jr. (21st), Earick Rayburn (opposing Anthony Beale in the 9th), and Eldora Davis, running in the 18th. The fact that many of the incumbents almost always support Daley is "a problem," Sampson said, but not as much as the support of unions. “We can’t have outside interlopers undercutting our leaders,” Sampson said.