The Latest Breaking News from Joe Ferguson

The most dramatic and controversial of Lopez’s proposals is to reduce the size of the City Council from 50 members to just 25. Alderpersons and mayors have talked about it for decades.

“What has changed in four years? Nothing. She’s basically handing off what she inherited from Rahm Emanuel,” mayoral challenger Paul Vallas said.

“We need to have a true speaker of the city, where the speaker presides over the City Council and not the mayor. You don’t see the governor presiding over … the General Assembly,” Ald. Anthony Beale said.

Decades ago, Chicago politicians curried favor with voters by distributing Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas hams. Garbage cans with an office-holder’s name on it were also a frequent freebie. But, the avalanche of federal stimulus funds has allowed Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Cook County Board President…

Any initiative that aims to fix Chicago’s faulty political landscape and the uncontrollable rubber-stamp monster it nurtures with morsels of corruption is essential.

It might sound like sour grapes from a man who was pushed out. But former Inspector General Joe Ferguson says “relative to the rhetoric of the campaign, certainly performance has not lived up to” what she promised.

Joe Ferguson’s 12-year run made him Chicago’s longest-serving watchdog. Now he wants to take a deeper look at the mayor’s office, city departments, the City Council, local government agencies under the mayor’s control — all to show it is “different from everywhere else” and how those differences…

“If city officials feel warm and fuzzy about the watchdog, the watchdog is probably not entirely doing their job,” Deborah Witzburg told the Sun-Times.

Now locked into a four-year term, Witzburg is free to confront what she calls the “debt of legitimacy” created by scandals involving two indicted pols: Ald. Edward Burke and former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.