Proposed random drug testing of city workers challenged
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter/fspielman@suntimes.com June 22, 2011 3:50PM
Updated: June 23, 2011 1:00PM
A controversial plan to randomly test the entire city work force—including aldermen--for alcohol and drugs has hit a speed bump amid warnings that it would invade privacy, cost $1.75 million-a-year and have trouble surviving a court challenge.
Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th), chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Audit and Workforce Development who doubles as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s floor leader, abruptly cancelled a committee hearing on his drug testing ordinance scheduled for Wednesday after encountering resistance from fellow aldermen and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The ACLU had been prepared to testify against the ordinance, on the same grounds it raised in a letter delivered to aldermen last week.
At a cost of $50-per-test, Chicago taxpayers can’t afford it. And “suspicionless drug testing proposals are unconstitutional.”
“Drug testing in the absence of individualized suspicion is stigmatizing. It creates a presumption of guilt that can only be rebutted by a negative test result,” Mary Dixon, legislative director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), wrote to Chicago aldermen.
Noting that a federal appeals court struck down a similar proposals for Cook County Jail employees, Dixon wrote, “The city of Chicago faces myriad challenges and few resources for addressing them. Suspicionless drug testing for 35,000 city employees does not advance solutions for these challenges—and violates the privacy rights of these employees.”
O’Connor said he called off the hearing because the corporation counsel and the budget office had concerns about the scope of the drug testing ordinance.
“Budget said it’s a good investment to save money on the back end, but not if it’s gonna run afoul of current court cases. The Law Department is working on what’s going on in other jurisdictions and will come back to us with an idea of what we can and can’t do,” O’Connor said.
“Whether it can be expanded to the whole work force right away, I don’t know. We obviously don’t want to put ourselves in a position where we’re overreaching what current law allows and spending dollars to defend something” that cannot be defended.
O’Connor has said the ordinance was motivated by the accident last month that saw a city laborer allegedly driving drunk drive a city truck onto a Gold Coast sidewalk, injuring a group of pedestrians, some seriously.
Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th), who co-sponsored the drug testing ordinance, said he and O’Connor “feel strongly” that the random drug and alcohol testing umbrella that currently covers police officers, firefighters and employees with commercial driver’s licenses needs to be broadened to include aviation security officers, garbage truck drivers and others whose impairment could endanger the public.
“Perhaps a clerk in the local ward office wouldn’t be likely to endanger the public safety if he or she were a user of drugs. But certainly a driver of a garbage truck or a piece of equipment that’s out on the streets” could be a danger, he said.
Burke said the cost of drug testing is “a concern.” But it’s not the overriding issue.
“Sometimes, a stitch in time saves nine,” he said. “I don’t know how much the taxpayers are gonna be on the hook for in that [Gold Coast] case. Isn’t it intelligent to invest some money to make sure that doesn’t happen, rather than pay multi-million dollar judgments?”
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