It’s time for aldermen to name their own committee leadership
Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, vice chair of the City Council’s ethics committee, introduced a resolution at September’s council meeting that would move him up to replace retired Ald. Michele Smith, 43rd, as committee chair.
A vice chair stepping up after a chair’s retirement might seem to outside observers like an uncontroversial routine bit of parliamentary housekeeping, but this is Chicago, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a classically mayoral response: “There’s a process by which we do that, and the process is the mayor makes the final picks.”
That’s been the Chicago Way for generations of mayors and aldermen. (Quite literally, in the case of the various dynasties that have made City Hall their family business.) Forget what you learned in school about separation of powers and for that matter what it says in the council’s own rules: In practice, here in Chicago, the mayor decides who’s in charge, and the council nods and says “yes.”
Those leadership positions are big plums to hand out. Each committee controls its own budget, ranging from $117,000 for the refugee rights committee to the finance committee’s $1.15 million. Most of that goes to staff salaries, Balkanizing the vast majority of the council’s resources across 19 offices with 19 different bosses.
For aldermen not blessed with a committee chairpersonship, there’s a very small Legislative Reference Bureau, or LRB, that answers to the president pro tempore and a Council Office of Financial Analysis, or COFA, that answers to the chair of the budget committee. Neither has anywhere near the staffing or funding to meet the research and analysis needs of a 50-member legislature.
The result is a council that’s not set up to legislate. Most aldermen function first and foremost as local red-tape cutters and gatekeepers to the city’s service departments. They’re more a part of the administration than a separate and coequal branch of government. Aldermen who want to take a more active role in shaping policy are hamstrung by a lack of access to the kind of legal, financial and research teams required to put together substantive legislation.
That’s especially clear at budget time, when the mayor lays out billions of dollars of taxpayer spending. Give or take some tweaks around the edges, the mayor’s proposal always passes — because good or bad, it’s the only game in town. The council doesn’t have the capacity to tear up the whole thing and write a new one.
The legislative muscles at City Hall are so atrophied that aldermen don’t even propose amendments on the floor, a routine parliamentary process they’re fully empowered to use. Instead, they use the budget hearings to ask the mayor’s staff to incorporate their preferred changes in the final version of the bill. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s all up to the mayor.
Turning the City Council into an independent body is going to require more than just breaking a habit of deferring to the mayor. Serious process and resource changes are needed to build a real legislative branch. Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, and Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, have put forward bills that would appoint an independent parliamentarian and legislative counsel, and the City Council should take those proposals and expand them further, consolidating the siloed committee, COFA and LRB staffs into a single policy shop overseen by a professional director — and, critically, not gate-kept by or answerable to any single elected official.
Taking ownership of their own staff and budget would require political courage, but there’s no reason for the City Council to maintain its weird, unspoken power-sharing agreement with the mayor. It’s a vestigial habit, a knee-jerk remnant of an age of political bosses and water carriers.
Members of the City Council should do themselves a favor and treat Martin’s resolution like the commonsense piece of housekeeping that it is — without waiting for approval from on high. It’s a good first step in the long rebuilding process our legislative branch desperately needs.