Do you want honest reform in Chicago? Mayor Daley want to tie the hands of the Inspector General. Mayor Daley, Alexander V. was a farce and a joke, are you getting scared? Read on honest Chicago Taxpayers, and read between the lines. Click below. Patrick McDonough
]]>Mayor to inspector: Deal with it
CITY HALL | But alderman calls new office a ‘smoke screen’ to control hiring
August 22, 2007
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter
Mayor Daley on Tuesday flatly denied he’s trying to undermine his corruption-fighting inspector general by creating an Office of Compliance to police city hiring.
“They investigate wrongdoing. This is compliance. It’s day and night. You have to comply first. First you have to get everybody educated about it. You have to work with people. You have to make sure there’s checks and balances in the compliance,” Daley said.
City attorneys filed a hiring plan in federal court sharply limiting the inspector general’s role because they were unable to reach an agreement with federal hiring monitor Noelle Brennan about who should pick up where Brennan leaves off, the mayor said.
“If the parties cannot agree, the judge will make a decision. Simple as that,” Daley said, referring to U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen.
The Sun-Times reported last month that Daley wants to create a new Office of Compliance — with powers strikingly similar to those of Inspector General David Hoffman — to police city hiring after Brennan leaves.
Hoffman reacted angrily, warning that the new office could “undermine the effectiveness and independence” of the inspector general’s office.
‘City has no credibility’
Attorney Michael Shakman, whose landmark lawsuit was supposed to end political hiring but never did, sided with the inspector general and urged Andersen to do the same.
On Tuesday, Ald. Joe Moore (49th) emerged from a closed-door aldermanic briefing on the new department equally skeptical of the city’s motives.
“They tried to gussy it up and make it about compliance over all sorts of procedures and employee conduct. But this office is merely a smoke screen to allow the city to retain control over hiring,” the alderman said.
Moore noted that City Hall created a $12 million fund to compensate victims of the city’s rigged hiring process after the conviction last summer of Daley’s former patronage chief.
“The city has no credibility on this issue. They’ve shown an inability to comply with the Shakman decree. In the short term, they are well-intentioned. But in a few years when the heat is off, there’s no protection to prevent political hiring from starting to seep into the process again,” he said.
Shakman rips decision
Shakman agreed that the Daley administration “has not proven itself trustworthy” in administering a hiring system free of politics.
“For years, they said they were doing it on the up and up, and we now know that was not correct,” he said.
Shakman noted that Hoffman was “brought in when there was a big cloud over City Hall” created by the Hired Truck, city hiring and minority contracting scandals.
“It’s not appropriate — now that they’ve reached a settlement [in the Shakman case] — to say, ‘We no longer want to use the independent inspector general we brought in. We want to shift the responsibility to some newly created office,’ ” he said.