Chicago City Council—Who’s Minding the Store?
By Margaret Herring, LWV Chicago City Government Committee Chair
Ever wonder what your alderperson does? Have you watched the video interviews of Chicago alderpersons?
Others are looking at the Council, too. Staff at WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, The Daily Line, and Crain’s have compiled the attendance records of all 50 alderpersons since the 2019 election (look up your alderman's meeting attendance).
In addition, these three news teams have noted that, while the Council’s many committees have budgets that combined total in the millions of dollars, some rarely meet. The LWV Chicago City Government Committee conducted a similar review and found the same result.
That can mean wasted tax dollars—or over-reliance on the mayor’s office. As Joe Ferguson, former City of Chicago Inspector General, told WBEZ, when a committee doesn’t meet to do its work, “it means that no subject matter expertise is being amassed in that area, which means the council as a whole is suffering. It just renders the whole council poorer and that much more dependent on the kindness of strangers—the strangers here being the people in the mayor’s office.”
Joe Ferguson was one of several speakers at LWV Chicago's 2022 State of the City fundraiser. You can still buy tickets or make a donation to watch a recording of the program.
LWV Chicago’s City Government Committee has observed that there is a lack of transparency in moving items through the City Council's legislative process—it is often difficult to find the text of an item that has been introduced, for instance.
Want to help do something about timely disclosure of proposed action by the City Council and participation of its members? Contact us at league@lwvchicago.org or 312-939-5949 to join the City Government Committee.
Read on for more highlights of the aforementioned articles.
Who’s Minding the Store? And Watching the Cash Drawer?
WBEZ, Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line analyzed publicly available attendance records for 526 City Council meetings and committee meetings that occurred between May 2019 and December 2021 and found that Chicago alderpersons attended an average of about 81% of the meetings required of them.
This is an improvement over attendance during the four-year period ending in 2019, when the average alderman showed up only 64% of the time. The current tally nevertheless is a B-minus average, and it shows that alderpersons fail to attend hundreds of meetings of City Council committees. Read the full article.
City Council Committees
WBEZ found that the average City Council committee met 24 times between May 2019 and December 2021. However, a quarter of the committees met only ten times or fewer. One only met twice, despite having an annual budget exceeding $100,000. The article looked at four committees that meet rarely: Education, Ethics and Oversight, and newly formed Immigration and Refugee Rights and Reparations.
Ineffectual committees that rarely meet may be wasting—or even misusing—taxpayer dollars, said Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general. And, they keep the council dependent on the mayor’s office for information and analysis. Read the full article.