Officials play musical chairs with city jobs

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Updated: September 29, 2011 12:26AM

You might call it trading places, Chicago-style.

The chief of staff to CTA Board Chairman Terry Peterson resigns to become Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chief of staff.

Theresa Mintle’s $175,000-a-year job is promptly filled by Joan Coogan, director of former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s scandal-scarred Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the center of the city hiring scandal.

Peterson is a former Emanuel campaign loyalist who was retained by the new mayor as part of a team that includes newly-appointed CTA President Forrest Claypool, the former Cook County commissioner.

Peterson could not be reached for comment to explain why he picked Coogan to replace Mintle. Coogan was a 12-year veteran IGA employee who worked to advance Daley’s agenda in the City Council — even as federal prosecutors were accusing the office of rigging city hiring to benefit the Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO) and other pro-Daley armies of political workers.

Peterson served as a deputy chief of staff, a former 17th Ward aldermen, Chicago Housing Authority chief and Daley’s 2007 campaign manager before taking a top job at Rush University Medical Center and accepting the part-time job as CTA Board chairman.

It’s not the first time that the CTA has provided a soft landing for outgoing city officials and those seeking to fatten their government pensions.

In 2002, the brother of one of Daley’s closest friends in politics quit his $115,260-a-year job as Fleet Management commissioner to accept a $95,000-a-year CTA job created just for him.

By jumping through an early retirement window, Robert Degnan got a lump-sum bonus of 10 percent of his annual city salary in addition to a 75 percent city pension that he was free to collect on top of his CTA salary.

Degnan remained in that job until May 31, 2009, when he resigned to start collecting his two government pensions. His annual retirement check from the city amounted to $92,208. His CTA annual pension was $10,997.

In January 2010, Daley dumped the chief of staff responsible for the parking meter fiasco that struck a raw nerve with Chicago motorists.

But instead of firing Paul Volpe, Daley demoted his chief of staff to the job of budget director for the CTA. Volpe has since been promoted to the loftier title of vice-president for budget and capital finance with an annual salary of $163,777.

The trend continued last fall, when Karen Seimetz, the city’s former first assistant corporation counsel and chief labor negotiator, was appointed by the CTA Board to serve as the mass transit agency’s $170,000-a-year general counsel.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported earlier this week that Seimetz was one of 1,026 former city employees who together collected $7.4 million in payments for accrued and unused vacation time.

Seimetz got a vacation check for $21,226. Coogan’s vacation payment, if there is one, has not yet been processed.

Daley’s former patronage chief Robert Sorich and former Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Al Sanchez were subsequently convicted of rigging city hiring and promotions to benefit the soldiers in Daley’s political army.

Under Emanuel, the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs will be called the Mayor’s Office of Legislative Counsel and Government Affairs.