Entries associated with the tag "Chicago City Council":

Heretofore best-known as the Chicago politician who launched a thousand bad headlines with her proposed ban on chickens in residential homes, alderman Lona Lane has been successful in her attempt to prohibit the urban menace known as the ice cream truck from the 18th Ward.  Mike Sula's on the story over at the Food Chain.

Mayor Daley and his top aides--and by extension most aldermen--are big on the idea of making Chicago the greenest city in the country. In fact, some seem to believe it’ll be true if they simply say it enough. The incantations are now uttered at just about every city event remotely linked to an environmental issue—it doesn’t take much except a nearby trash can and accompanying blue recycling bin—and Tuesday’s joint meeting of the City Council’s finance, environment, and economic development committees was no exception. One after another, aldermen and business leaders described their city as green and getting greener: "one of the world leaders in the green and sustainable economic market . . . "; “the premier green market for the world . . . "; "a model for the world . . ."; "a huge success . . ."; "a leader in the environmentally friendly green cities in the world . . ."; "building on the reputation we’ve already developed . . . "; "more in Chicago than any other city . . . "

Amid the environmentally friendly backslapping, though, a serious and complicated discussion was slowly getting started: Aldermen were talking about a resolution, introduced by the First Ward’s Manny Flores, that called for a hearing to create city standards defining a "green business."

"What is considered 'green' or 'sustainable'?" Flores asked. "Barack Obama’s talked about creating five million new jobs in clean technologies—well, how do we determine whether or not these companies we might be allocating public dollars for are indeed 'clean technologies'?"

The issue, Flores went on to explain, is that city leaders widely agree that Chicago's economy will increasingly depend on recruiting and supporting green businesses—those that make a minimal impact on the environment as well as those that help others do so, from wind turbine factories to banks that lend to sustainable startups. But there’s no way the city can responsibly and effectively offer tax breaks, grants, or other incentives to sustainable businesses without first determining which ones truly are. Flores said that’s why the city should gather business leaders, academics, developers, legal experts, and environmental advocates to draw up measures of what "green" means. Voicing support, administration officials said they believed Chicago would be the first city to set these kinds of standards. 

And what might the standards be? There the discussion enters a bit of a gray area. Working out of energy-efficient buildings? Developing sustainable energy sources? Promoting “social equity”? Perhaps an ever-evolving list of these things and others, according to several experts who testified, including George Nassos, director of the environmental management program at IIT.

"We should move on this and move quickly," he said. "If we have a standard like this in place it will draw the companies here that are truly environmental so they don’t have to compete with companies that are just greenwashing."

Others agreed, while warning it may not be so easy to lay out clear definitions. "This is a crucially important issue to the city," said Peter Nicholson, founder of the Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance. "That said, it’s an enormous challenge. . . . What may be green today may not be green later. It’s a process, and it has to be updated regularly."

That process wasn’t going to get much further at this particular meeting—aldermen weren’t about to start hashing out the city’s "green matrix" in their first public conversation about it, and in fact they recessed without any formal decision to do it at all. But it would have been hard for them to miss the message from their expert witnesses.

"We risk losing our advantage to other countries and to other regions," said Nicholson, "if we do not move and move aggressively on these issues."

As president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, Mark Donahue isn’t happy about any of the scores of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department. But he’s particularly frustrated that the department hasn’t filled more than 100 openings for field training officers who provide rookie cops with on-the-street training, and he's outraged that the program has just been scaled back further.

"What they’ve implemented for field training officers is probably going to devastate the entire training program," Donahue says.

As much as the union and elected officials love to talk about putting more police on the street, training and deployment strategies typically have a far greater impact on law enforcement than a handful of extra cops. And Donahue says that when the field training program is working right, the training officers can show inexperienced police how to work with the community—a key to improving relations as well as reducing crime.

But in a year when murders are up, deadly clashes between police and civilians still happen regularly, and the department rank and file is suffering low morale, the department only had 149 field training officers on the payroll as of August, well under the 267 called for in this year’s budget.

Worse, Donahue says, the department recently decided to cut in half the number of police districts that use the field training program—it’s now down to just six of the city’s 25. That’s a huge disincentive, according to Donahue, since most veteran cops would have to transfer to a new district to participate. 

"As many as 50 percent of training officers are going to be resigning because of the stipulations they’ve put on them," Donahue says. "It’s unthinkable that the department would make such a decision."

I’d like to report what the department’s take on this is, but no one from its news affairs division responded to my call.

The backdrop for all of this, of course, is the city’s $420 million budget hole, which will likely require hundreds of layoffs, unfilled positions, and early retirements to plug--though the Daley administration hasn't been saying much about it. Some aldermen, though, are quietly suggesting that Donahue’s union could pay for a few more jobs if it were willing to give up a few costly perks. On top of their regular pay, officers receive $730 every three months for “duty availability”—that is, simply being on call, even though they get additional overtime pay if they actually have to take an extra shift. They receive another $600 every three months to pay for new uniforms, and they can take a check for any furlough time they deserve but don’t use. These benefits add up to about $73 million a year.

"Apparently the aldermen grumbling about such things don’t see the hypocrisy of their grumblings," Donahue says. "The average police officer coming out of the police academy onto the force is going to make an investment of $7,000 to $9,000 dollars—the department doesn’t buy the uniform, doesn’t buy the guns, doesn’t buy the shoes. What would the aldermen say if we proposed cutting the money for their staff and expenses?"

Good news for information junkies and City Hall watchdogs. 

City clerk Miguel del Valle has made good on his campaign promise to open things up a little bit. At the very least, he recently finished posting on his Web site all the City Council journals of proceedings going back to 1980.

The journal keeps track of all legislation approved by the City Council -- everything from TIFs to zoning changes. Del Valle's site also has roll call votes, so you can see how your alderman voted on the issues of the day.

I could say, well, it's about time. But that would be ungrateful. So thank you, city clerk del Valle. I was wrong and you were right -- there are some good things a city clerk can do, even with the big boss on the fifth floor. I also take back all the snide things I wrote -- actually quoting your old friend Congressman Luis Gutierrez -- when you joined Mayor Daley's ticket.

Now about those TIFs . . .

On Tuesday a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found links between the chemical bisphenol A and health ailments in humans, including heart disease, diabetes, and liver problems. That might be enough to put some life into a proposed ban on children's products containing BPA that's been buried for months in the bowels of the City Council.

"Given the additional information we've received, it's now the appropriate time to move forward and galvanize the political support for it," says First Ward alderman Manny Flores, one of the sponsors of the proposal. "This is a health issue, and that's one of our core responsibilities as a municipality."

Flores and 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke introduced the proposal [PDF]--which would prohibit certain plastic baby bottles, among other items--on May 14, when council business was dominated by a defense of the right to eat foie gras. The next meeting was, by aldermanic decree, all about the children, but the BPA measure remained at rest in the City Council's license and finance committees--even though Burke chairs the latter. Flores says they needed additional evidence to convince other aldermen the ban was important, especially after the federal Food and Drug Administration determined over the summer that BPA was safe--or, more precisely, that "an adequate margin of safety exists." 

"People had me down and out on this BPA stuff," Flores says. 

The Chicago Police Department released data Monday confirming that crime citywide has increased from a year ago, including homicides, which are up 18 percent. Unless I missed it, no aldermen were outraged enough to call for hearings this time. Why would they? It’s August, the quiet time around City Hall. Plus, the spike in crime wasn’t unexpected; the numbers were trending upward at about the same rates last month and the month before that and the month before that. And of course the politics of the moment don’t warrant it: no one’s been shot during a festival downtown in the last few weeks, the governor has generously offered state police backup "near" crime-plagued areas, and the attention of the International Olympic Committee is on another city halfway around the world. What’s the point in publicly dressing down the police chief now?

When aldermen summoned top cop Jody Weis to a City Council hearing last month, they cited an unprecedented level of violence at the Taste of Chicago and questioned whether police handled problems as aggressively as they should have. But that analysis appears to have been based on anecdotal evidence—i.e., bad PR—rather than facts.

During the ten days of the Taste, the city’s 911 center received 2,634 calls requesting police from within the First District, which includes the Loop and Grant Park, according to the city's Office of Emergency Communications. That was a small increase—1 percent—from the 2,599 calls made during the 2007 Taste, a figure that was up slightly from the 2,581 calls made in 2006.

It seems to me that anyone seeking to understand how police actually responded to safety concerns at the Taste would need to know how many people were arrested. But a police spokesman told me the department doesn’t know offhand, and apparently no public figure has asked it to find out. "After a thorough search, I must inform you that the Department does not maintain an existing public record or program that captures the information you seek," Freedom of Information officer Matthew Sandoval wrote me. Digging the numbers up, he added, would be too burdensome.

It’s now clear that the City Council questioning of police chief Jody Weis Tuesday had two purposes: (1) to send a message to the world, and particularly that small slice of it known as the International Olympic Committee, that Chicago’s leaders are going to crack heads and take care of this unpleasant gun violence problem (or at least make sure it’s banished from downtown); and (2) to allow the mayor to make a pointed argument—delivered via his handpicked police chief and surrogates in the council, who would not act on an issue like this without Daley's knowledge and consent—that the real source of this mess is an overly aggressive push to discipline police officers.

This second matter is the one most likely to impact the daily lives of people in Chicago. 

"I have heard from many officers that there is a degree of timidness--that people are not maybe as engaged as they should be because of fears of lawsuits, fears of [complaints registered] being put against them by criminals and by other folks who are just trying to impugn their integrity," Weis said, as quoted by the Sun-Times.

We’ve heard this argument many times before. “I understand there may be a few bad apples in the bushel, but there are gangbangers and drug dealers in the neighborhoods who learn how to file complaints against officers,” the 47th Ward's Eugene Schulter said in a hearing just last week that gave alderman an opportunity to tee off on the Independent Police Review Authority, the agency charged with vetting complaints about cops.

Schulter/Weis/Daley make a disturbing argument, but it’s certainly not the full story. Some thugs may actually file complaints to taint good cops and, as a result, undermine the process for disciplining not-so-good ones. Then again, it's also possible that some cops may actually rack up complaints from honest citizens concerned about their conduct.

From April through June the IPRA closed its investigations into 672 cases that involved either allegations of misconduct, reports of an officer discharging a weapon, or other “extraordinary occurrences” such as a suspect dying in custody, according to the authority’s most recent report (which can't be viewed on all browsers). The vast majority—at least 523—didn’t result in any finding against the officers. In fact, in 230 of these cases the person who filed the complaint refused to sign an affidavit, an assertion under oath that the testimony is true. This figure could underscore what Daley, Weis, and the aldermen are ranting about: if gangbangers are indeed filing frivolous complaints about cops just to screw with them, they’re probably not going to follow up by taking a trip to IPRA headquarters to sign affidavits.

And another 86 cases were closed after investigators ruled the allegations were simply “unfounded.”

Still, at least 203 were “not sustained,” which essentially means the evidence wasn’t substantial enough to prove misconduct or innocence.

And I can tell you from firsthand experience that it’s not that easy to file a complaint--and it’s far less easy to prove it’s justified.

A couple of years ago I was on the Red Line headed south of the Loop when a couple of cops stepped onto the car and immediately approached a teenager and asked for his ID. He provided it, and one of the officers glanced it over and then put it into his pocket. The kid demanded to have it back; the cop told him he’d return it when the kid got off the train—which, the cop said, would be at the next stop.

Sure enough, we pulled up to the 47th Street station and the officer shoved the teenager off the train, pushed him over to a support beam, and ordered him to put his hands up. As we pulled away, the officer was kicking the kid in the legs.

Maybe I don’t need to say this, but I will: I respect and admire the thousands of officers on the force who help keep me safe every day I’m in this city, and most of those I’ve interacted with appeared to be serious about their jobs because they cared about people they’d never met. But this cop’s behavior was way out of line. I wasn’t the only person who thought so—our train car was buzzing about what had just happened. So I took down the names and phone numbers of four or five others who’d seen the whole thing and put in a call right then to the Office of Professional Standards, the IPRA’s predecessor. I was told they’d look into it.

A few weeks later an investigator got in touch with me and asked me to come down to their offices on the south side. I hadn’t gotten the officer’s name or star number, and OPS couldn’t figure out which cops might have been on a southbound CTA train at the time of the incident, so the investigator needed me to take a look at the photos of a bunch of officers.

I had to take a half day off work to make the trip down there, wait awhile, wait some more, then finally get escorted to the desk of an investigator who pulled up a bunch of photos of officers on her computer screen . . . only to determine what you might expect: there was no way to look at someone’s head shot and honestly say yes, that’s the guy I saw once, several weeks ago, from several yards away, most of the time with his back to me, seemingly harassing a teenager who didn’t appear to do anything other than act like a teenager.

Many weeks later I received a letter from OPS in the mail. The complaint, it said, had not been sustained. The case was closed.

Our ongoing problems with violence demand action, including vigorous public debate. But I wonder if engaging in baldly political displays shows any respect for Chicago Police officers or the citizens they try to serve and protect.

Police chief Jody Weis told aldermen Tuesday that he's looking into reorganizing and re-energizing police coverage across the city, possibly with strategies ranging from drawing up new police beats to reminding officers to be aggressive to creating new squads that could be mobilized in gang-infested and crime-plagued neighborhoods. But that all sounds a bit too familiar to John Hagedorn, a criminal justice professor at UIC whose extensive writings on gangs and crime include the new A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (University of Minnesota Press). The rookie police chief, Hagedorn says, is essentially continuing an anti-gang policy that's been ineffective since the first Mayor Daley introduced it in 1969. 

  
MD: The Chicago police superintendent has just told aldermen that a poor economy and gang culture are provoking the city’s problems with violence. In your newest book, though, you downplay joblessness as a cause of gangs and gang violence. Instead, you say gangs are a response to racism and “social exclusion.”

JH: I’m from Milwaukee, and one of the differences between Milwaukee and Chicago was that up there we watched the gangs form along with deindustrialization. But here the gangs preceded deindustrialization--they’ve been around for decades! Something else is at work.

Since the beginning of globalization you see a reaction of all sorts of armed groups around the world saying, “We’ve got to get our own.” And in this country it’s very deeply tied to race--in other places to ethnicity, religion, or tribe. As the state withdraws a lot of social services, the gangs work to fill in the vacuum.

You argue that the best approach to gangs is to try to reach out to them and change them into community assets. Is that practical? The superintendent's not going to pitch that to the City Council.

It’s not what people want to hear. It may be that in this climate it isn’t possible to say, “We want to work with the gang structure.” But if you don’t work with these guys, who’s going to stop the violence?

And do you think the gangs aren’t already involved with politics in Chicago? Lots have ties to local aldermen. They’re very aware of the gangs. There’s been an official policy here for 40 years of not including anybody in a community project who’s involved with gangs, but that’s not really the way it works.

So you don’t think that any new, aggressive police tactics will end gang violence.

There’s been a 40 years’ war on gangs that we’ve had in Chicago. Instead of the police getting assault weapons, maybe we should reevaluate that war. The police are at war with the gangs, and the gangs are institutions with deep roots in their community. [The police] don’t seek to convert them and it’s one side against another. That war mentality is what needs to change here, but the new police chief has bought into it. War is a funny way to confront violence.

When I came here 12 years ago I was invited to a meeting with people doing community policing and all the evaluations of it, and they asked me what I thought. I suggested they invite young people and gang members and ask them what’s going on. That was the last meeting I was invited to.

You argue that the Vice Lords tried to become a community organization in the 1960s but were targeted by the police and eventually turned to the drug trade. What are you seeing on the west side now?

Because I’ve developed relationships with the Vice Lords guys from the 1960s I’ve been trying to bring them together with some of the younger people out there. We’ve had like four generations of the Vice Lords sitting down and talking. A lot of these guys have never heard those stories of the 60s. Young people today can be influenced by the past. It’s important for young people to see that the gang has been different things through the years, and the only route isn’t the drug deal.

Have you seen progress?

Hopefully some things are coming together. A lot of people are involved with their little hustles or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they’re stuck there. There’s a reason why the drug trade is so big--there aren’t any jobs. The issue is how you see it and treat it--do you see everyone in it as evil? Well, then, you can just fill the prisons.

You try to keep organizing. I think giving up and waging war are two sides of the same coin. What’s needed is some quiet diplomacy—sitting down with these young people and saying, “What do you need?” And then acting on it.

But I think Chicago’s going to continue to get hot. The city wants the Olympic bid and they don’t want to be seen having a problem with gang violence. They’re going to try to crack down, but that’s just going to end up hurting their bid.

The City Council's great debate over the Children Museum is over, and the burning question is this: How did we do with our predictions? 

Overall, not so bad. The council voted 33-16 with one absentee (alderman Carrie Austin) to approve Mayor Daley's proposal to move the Children's Museum into Grant Park over the wishes of local alderman Brendan Reilly and many of his constituents. Mick predicted the vote would go 35-15 for the mayor; Ben, ever the optimist, had it going 31-19. Here's where we blundered.

Second Ward alderman Robert Fioretti: We both predicted he would vote against the mayor, but he wimped out. Some days he's acted like an independent; now he's behaving like one of the boys, albeit slicker and smoother. So what's he angling for?

Third Ward alderman Pat Dowell: Ben picked it--she voted against the mayor. As she called out to Mick before today's vote, "You had me wrong." Glad to hear it.

Fifth Ward alderman Leslie Hairston: Voted against the mayor after we predicted she wouldn't. Obviously she has more guts--or more vocal lakefront constituents--than we thought.

Thirteenth Ward alderman Frank Olivo: He voted with the mayor. Ben: "I thought his boss, Michael Madigan, would make him go to bat for Reilly, Madigan's former legislative aide. Boy, did I misjudge Madigan's loyalty. I wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with him." Mick: "A 'no' vote would have required Olivo to say something other than 'aye.'"

Fifteenth Ward alderman Toni Foulkes: We predicted she would vote against the mayor, but she voted with him. Got to give credit to--gulp--Orion, one of this blog's leading fans/critics. He hit this one right on the head when he wrote, "Ring up another one we have flipped."

Twenty-first Ward alderman Howard Brookins: This was a late-hour flip--trust us. The mayor must have put the squeeze on. And hard.

Twenty-second Ward alderman Rick Munoz: We had him voting against the mayor--in fact, we thought this one was a no-brainer--but he didn't. Is he going the way of Helen Shiller? Does this mean he won't be able to lead the independent caucus anymore?

24th Ward alderman Sharon Denise Dixon: We assumed she traded her vote for the Ogden-Pulaski TIF deals. But she proved us wrong. West side!

26th Ward alderman Billy Ocasio: A resounding 'yes' when we'd both predicted  no. Ben: "I didn't really believe he had the guts to buck the mayor--Mick made me do it, I swear." Mick: "Mayor Daley made Ocasio do it--I swear."

41st Ward alderman Brian Doherty: We predicted he would vote with the mayor, but he rebelled. There must be more opposition to the museum on far northwest side than we realized (which just goes to show you what lackeys alderman Margaret Laurino and Patrick Levar are).

44th Ward alderman Tom Tunney: Ben was right and Mick was wrong--he voted against the mayor. Mick: "To my shock, he stuck up for the lakefront, not the man."

47th Ward alderman Eugene Schulter: Same as Tunney. Mick: "In other words, he caught hell from his ward."

Find out--and find out why you should care--Friday at the Hideout, when Reader political writer and Clout City blogger Mick Dumke will be a guest on the Interview Show, hosted by reporter/humorist Mark Bazer and held the first Friday of every month. Other guests include the immortal Doug Sohn of Hot Doug's.

The Interview Show, Fri 6/6, 6:30 PM, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, $5. 

Aldermen get defensive when they're accused of being mayoral rubber stamps. But it's a given around City Hall that the fate of most of the matters sent to them for "consideration" has been decided well beforehand. A few examples from the past two days alone:

Accurate prediction made by the chairman of a council committee to a reporter just before the committee began debate of a controversial ordinance:

"It's going to pass."

CITY OFFICIAL TO CHURCH PASTOR: Now all we have left is the full City Council, and they'll approve it at their meeting next week. You don't have to come down here for it.

CHURCH PASTOR: OK, great.

Statement to reporter by veteran alderman chatting up the prospects of a proposed ordinance before another committee:

"Well, the committee chairman is obviously in favor of it, and ordinarily if it gets through a committee it'll be approved by the full council."

Sample of aldermanic comments in the first few minutes of another committee meeting:

ALDERMAN A: I think this is great.

ALDERMAN B: I want to commend you. I think this is great.

ALDERMAN C: This is really a great project.

ALDERMAN D: I'd love a project like this in my ward.

ALDERMAN E: Why are we here?

Sinc