ChicagoClout

Read an excellent article by Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times. Daley hiring chief quits February 1, 2008 BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter The top mayoral aide charged with implementing a city hiring system free of politics is leaving her $147,156-a-year job -- six weeks after a federal hiring monitor accused the city of regressing in its efforts. Jacqueline King has decided to return to her old job as head of Graphics and Reproduction. Underlings welcomed her departure. City Hall sources said they had chafed under her autocratic management style. Jacqueline King in 2006. King ordered 50 employees to reapply for their old jobs -- or risk being fired -- in a reorganization tied to the switch to computerized scoring and screening of job applicants. Employees told the Chicago Sun-Times they felt "stunned and betrayed" after learning of their fate on the Internet site Craigslist. "Without a doubt, she was a tough manager. There are people who don't like that. There are a lot of people who disagree with her management style and they'd like you to believe she was run out of there," said mayoral press secretary Jacquelyn Heard. "I can tell you unequivocally she was not asked or forced to leave. This is her decision. She's tired of doing what she's been doing and she wants to go back to Graphics." King could not be reached for comment. Heard denied that the change was tied to the monitor's report--or that it was a setback in the city's efforts to move beyond the city hiring scandal. "If you read the monitor's last report, it had nothing bad to say about Jacky King," she said. Federal monitor Noelle Brennan could not be reached for comment. In her year-end report, Brennan accused the city of slipping backward -- not with the "wholesale overt manipulation of interviews" on display during the federal corruption trial that culminated in the conviction of former patronage chief Robert Sorich, but with "other, more subtle types of manipulation of the hiring process." Brennan said the alleged violations she uncovered in response to 685 complaints ran the gamut -- from "hundreds" of city employees illegally "acting up" in higher-paid, temporary positions to the city's failure to "meaningfully enforce consequences for non-compliance." The monitor branded as "an area of significant concern" Daley's failure to discipline current city employees "directly implicated in Shakman violations" during testimony at the Sorich trial. "The city's ongoing failure to effectively monitor compliance with the reformed policy, coupled with the failure to take any disciplinary action when violations occur, is certain to result in on-going violations," she wrote. A few weeks later, the federal judge who appointed Brennan agreed to let the Daley-created Office of Compliance oversee city hiring after Brennan's departure, instead of Inspector General David Hoffman. But U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen included two major safeguards: that the hiring czar not be a current or former city employee and have no ties to Chicago politics, and that the city maintain a log to keep track of the times when the mayor's office or politicians lobby department heads for jobs. The city has agreed to create a $12 million fund to compensate victims of the city's rigged hiring system. Well written Fran Spielman, Patrick McDonough