Lightfoot defends police pension board against criticism
In dueling news conferences, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza clashed over whether the city’s benefits for police officers disabled by COVID-19 is fair to cops.
At issue is a ruling by the city pension board that denied Mendoza’s police officer brother, Sgt. Joaquin Mendoza, full disability benefits after he was infected with COVID-19 and was disabled. Susana Mendoza accused the city of setting impossible standards for cops to receive benefits and criticized the mayor’s political appointees on a pension board for a decision giving him fewer benefits.
For her part, Lightfoot said she takes police officer safety seriously but defended the board’s decision as having been issued by a board and affirmed by a court. “It’s not for me to second-guess a decision that was rendered by a board,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot also said she doesn’t believe the standard is too high.
“Let’s work to fix what is broken, if it’s broken, but the leveling of accusations on people for following the law is simply unnecessary, unfair and false,” Lightfoot said.
Just a week before the municipal election in which Lightfoot is seeking a second term, Mendoza sought to blame the mayor’s appointees on the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund board for voting to deny duty benefits to her brother and another officer. Mendoza claims that more than a dozen other officers who contracted COVID-19 have disability cases “in the pipeline.”
“I do hold the mayor accountable because that’s her board,” Mendoza said. “And so she can’t say with one face that you support the men and women in uniform, our first responders, and then do what they did to them.”
Four of the eight members of the police pension board are appointed by the mayor.
Mendoza said Tuesday she’s seeking passage of state legislation that would grant police officers, firefighters and emergency