Burke tried to tackle workers comp woes
Most staff proposals 4 years ago were 'not viable,' Daley aide says
Four years ago, Ald. Edward M. Burke's staff suggested several measures to "dramatically'' reduce the city's soaring workers compensation bills.
Among them: creating busy work for injured workers who were now physically able to return to work but remained at home because they could no longer do their old jobs.
Mayor Daley's administration didn't adopt that recommendation, or most of the others.
Most "were not legally viable," Daley's press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard, said Thursday.
Two were, Heard said. The city set up a system to electronically report workplace accidents to Burke's committee more quickly. And it offered his committee investigators from the city Law Department to do surveillance of workers suspected of faking injuries. Heard said Burke's committee never used those investigators, though a former top Burke aide said in a 2002 memo that "undercover surveillance of employees that we suspected are malingerers or committing fraud" was eliminated for lack of money.
The mayor's office and Burke have been pointing fingers at each other in the wake of a recent Chicago Sun-Times investigation that found that city workers with political clout claim to be injured at a rate that far exceeds any occupation tracked by the U.S. Labor Department. The series, "Clout's Sick List," also raised questions about whether all those city workers really were injured, and whether the city adequately investigates workplace accidents.
The administration's failure to find new jobs for 45 city employees who'd recovered from their injuries -- some who'd been off the job for as long as 10 years -- prompted Burke's former chief administrative officer, Stephen M. Murray, to send a 17-page memo dated Sept. 11, 2002, to Daley's then-budget director, William Abolt. The city had spent more than $6.7 million on those workers' injury claims, and Murray warned it could cost another $4 million unless new jobs were found for them.
"The committee is proposing that we implement a program that the utilities, a large food chain and our police department use,'' Murray wrote -- "a location to accommodate employees with restrictions be initiated for an eight-hour workday. These employees will perform functions like writing out signs for towing, no parking, street sweeping, etc. Phone banks can be established to call citizens to advise them of warming and cooling shelters. . . .
"If this program were implemented," Murray wrote, "I can guarantee that many of the permanently disabled would get the 'Lourdes' cure and return to their department with no or minimal restrictions and our costs would be reduced dramatically."
Murray noted that many city workers had a history of filing multiple injury claims -- against the city and previous employers.
And he questioned why some were ever hired. "We hire persons that are physically incapable of doing the work they are hired to do," Murray wrote.
Capobianco, 44, of Geneva, has gotten more than $480,000 in disability payments since he claimed to have injured his back in 1983 while working as a garbage man for the city of Chicago. He was deemed "permanently and totally disabled" -- a designation that was supposed to mean he was unable to ever work again.
But in the series "Clout's Sick List," the Sun-Times reported Sunday that Capobianco, who went to art school while he was on disability leave from the city, is paid to teach watercolor painting at the Arts Center in Highland Park.
Capobianco is also licensed as a security guard, though Holub said he was unaware of Capobianco holding another job.