Council Wars may be back

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Updated: February 10, 2012 8:33AM

The Chicago City Council has a new jobs program.

That’s the plain and simple purpose of the scandalous and shameful shenanigans in Chicago’s ward remap fight.

Every decade, the Council must draw new electoral and political districts based on new Census figures. The map must adhere to the Federal Voting Rights Act by providing fair and equal representation for people of color.

Council Wars is here again. For months, black, brown and white aldermen have been mired in a dangerous, racially charged stalemate over how to draw the lines.

An early December negotiating meeting in City Hall erupted into a near fist-fight, replete with profanity and racial epithets, reported Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times. A cop had to be called to “restore order,” Spielman reported.

The Council contretemps once again shatters the myth that under the Daley/Emanuel era Chicago has been a racially harmonic metropolis, where we all hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” on every street corner.

Instead, you hear trash talk, threats and grandiosity. It’s an incumbency protection program.

The Latino aldermen say the 25,218 population increase Hispanics posted in the 2010 Census means they deserve 13 wards, plus three “influence” wards, in the new map.

The Council’s Black Caucus irrationally argues that African-American aldermen should hold on to at least 18 wards — though the black population dropped by 181,453 over the decade. Some argue that, because African Americans are Chicago’s largest population group (at 32.9 percent), they deserve the most “representation.”

Come on. It’s all about jobs — their own.

Meanwhile, the white aldermen are trying to get out of the way. You can see the pain in Ald. Richard Mell’s face (and derriere) as he ducks and dodges around City Hall. The longtime chairman of the City Council’s Rules Committee is charged with riding herd over the mapmaking.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

That’s the same Dick Mell who is most famous for his tabletop holler, “We have a mayor!” when, back in 1987, he announced the backroom deal to replace the late Mayor Harold Washington. That pact set back African-American political empowerment for the next quarter century.

The Council is on a full-speed collision course, and voters will be the roadkill.

The city is shrinking. Something’s got to give, and it may be our hard-earned cash. If the Council can’t overcome its venality and get a map done, dueling proposals will go before the voters in a referendum. No matter what we decide, one of the warring factions will challenge it in court. In the 1990s, the last remap slugfest cost taxpayers $20 million in legal fees to politically connected law firms.

Chicago voters have paid scant attention to this crisis, but it’s we who will pay the bills.

No wonder so many Chicagoans have already left town.