Civic group urges cutting City Council, privatizing Midway

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Updated: June 30, 2011 4:44AM

The Civic Federation is offering Mayor Rahm Emanuel a road-map to financial stability that includes everything from cutting the City Council in half and privatizing Midway Airport to doing away with an elected clerk and treasurer and targeting the previously- sacrosanct Police and Fire Departments.

Emanuel himself broached the subject of shrinking the City Council from 50 to 25 members during private meetings with aldermen, only to settle for a ten percent cut in City Council spending.

Now, the Civic Federation is renewing the call for a change that can only be made by the Illinois General Assembly or by Chicago voters in the form of a binding referendum.

“Chicago’s Council is the second largest of the 15 largest American cities, exceeded only by New York’s 51-member legislative body. The average council size for the top 15 municipalities is 18,” the report stated, pointing to the $25.8 million annual budget for City Council expenses.

“If most of the populous cities in the nation can operate successfully with smaller councils, it is difficult to understand why Chicago should be such an outlier.”

The proposal to revive the $2.5 billion privatization of Midway, a deal that collapsed for lack of financing, flies in the face of candidate Rahm Emanuel’s pledge to steer clear of that deal on the heels of the parking meter fiasco. A Midway deal would also have a difficult time winning City Council approval for the same reasons.

The 115-page report includes other cost-cutting ideas. They include:

◆ Eliminating ward-based service delivery.

◆ Closing city health clinics to focus on “core health functions related to infectious disease prevention and control.”

◆ Centralizing inspections and reorganizing the city’s infrastructure departments into three new departments: Infrastructure, Water Supply and Environment and Sanitation.

◆ Turning two other citywide elected officials — the clerk and treasurer — into mayoral appointees, another change that would require legislative approval. The appointed clerk would work directly for the City Council. The appointed treasurer would work in the Finance Department under the city comptroller.

◆ Consolidating pension funds, increasing contributions by the city and its employees, reducing benefits “not yet earned” by current city employees and creating a separate retiree health care trust fund. An agreement that covers the issue expires in 2013.

◆ Targeting the Chicago Police Department by eliminating “unnecessary layers of management” and supervisory benefits, reducing “chronic absenteeism” and redrawing maps of police districts and “strategizing beat staffing” based on the U.S. Census, 911 calls and relevant crime data.

◆ Cutting the Chicago Fire Department’s $526.5 million budget by re-evaluating everything from minimum staffing requirements for fire apparatus and the number and location of fire stations to possible out-sourcing and ways to reduce disability absences. The review would be the first since the largely-ignored, 1999 report by the Tri-Data Corp.

◆ Developing a “water management plan” to accurately determine all expenses, including infrastructure needs, so rates can be adjusted to “recover the full cost of delivering water service.”

◆ Divide the city into “franchise areas” and hire a private waste hauler for each to service residential buildings and businesses that don’t get city garbage pick-up.