Elected leaders thrive on wielding their authority. But in Chicago, alderpersons have been giving their powers away for decades without much of a fight.
They have grown accustomed to green lighting whoever the mayor chooses to serve on the City Council’s committees and more importantly, to run them.
Because mayors have handpicked their allies for committee chairmanships, dissent is not commonplace. Mayors set the agenda for the most part, including when to meet and how the vote on matters will go, as former Inspector General Joe Ferguson told Sun-Times’ City Hall reporter Fran Spielman.
In essence, as most Chicagoans know: Whatever the mayor wants, he or she usually gets.
That scenario could easily change. City Council members are not powerless. They can select who they want on committees and who should lead them. State law and the city’s own rules — Rule #36 — clearly spell out they have that power. They just have always opted out and have given the mayor their blessing to do their bidding.
“It’s always been like that,” Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36th) was told after he was elected in 2015 and wanted to make sure he ended up on a committee that dealt with infrastructure, his area of expertise.
But Chicagoans don’t have to accept the status quo. Our state and federal government don’t operate in this manner. It’s fair to ask hard questions about why Chicago — the only major city that allows the mayor to dictate committee chairs, according to Ferguson — is allowed to run this way.
If politics as usual continues, an independent City Council simply cannot exist.
“Allowing the mayor to appoint committee chairs cedes substantial power from the legislature to the administration,” as the Better Government Association’s Bryan Zarou stated recently. Zarou urged City Council members to take back what is theirs by exercising their power to appoint committee leaders without the two cents of Lori Lightfoot — or anyone else who is elected as mayor.
Such a move would represent progress not just in making the council more independent but in holding them accountable for doing what their jobs require.
Villegas said he doesn’t see any change taking place until a charter is passed in Springfield that gives City Council members the ability to select a president or speaker who can facilitate the process for members to choose their own leaders.
And as Dick Simpson, a former alderperson and retired University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor, told us, that can only happen if there is a “desire for more independence.”
We’ll be able to gauge whether the City Council is ready for that independence when it votes on the resolution Ald. Matt Martin (47th) proposed last week, calling for his promotion from vice chairman to chairman of the Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight.
Martin would, it seems, be the natural choice. He has worked closely with now-retired chair Ald. Michele Smith (43rd) and knows the ins and outs of the committee and its most pressing issues.
But Lightfoot isn’t ready to give up her power.
“There’s a process by which we do that, and the process is the mayor makes the final picks,” Lightfoot said when asked about Martin’s resolution. “I don’t see any reason to break from that longstanding precedent.”
But breaking from precedent and taking back the control that belongs to them is a step Council members should think hard about making if they really want to shed their rubber stamp image and open up the democratic process.
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