Mayor Richard M. Daley's last day in office marks the end of 22 years and, as it's been said so many times recently, the end of an era for Chicago. The mayor reports to work one final time Friday at City Hall, where light-pole banners thanking Daley for his service hang outside and where hundreds turned out this week for an open house to say goodbye. Through city hall changes, privatization controversy and a quest to globalize the Windy City, Daley told NBC Chicago's Mary Ann Ahern this week that from start to finish he has "no regrets.
Daley has no plans to continue in public office. Instead he says he'll embark on a speaking tour, spend more time with his family and maybe write a book or teach a class. Daley, to City Hall.
Richard M. Daley rode into office vowing to end business as usual in city government. In his campaign for mayor, he was highly critical of a deal giving a politically connected woman named Barbara Jones Green the popcorn concession at Midway Airport.
The head of a minority-certified company, Green had been a major fundraiser for the late Mayor Harold Washington and was supporting acting mayor Eugene Sawyer. Daley suggested the deal hinged on "political cronyism" and "fundraising ability.
Daley won that election. And within a few years, another airport concession was at the center of controversy—only now it was Daley fending off the charges of clout and cronyism. In this case, W. Smith had snagged a ten-year extension on its newsstand license at O'Hare after cutting in two women who were friends of Maggie Daley, the mayor's wife, as percent minority partners.
When asked whether clout had wired that deal for Grace Barry and Barbara Burrell, who possessed little retail experience, Daley insisted that W. Smith could "hire or fire anyone they want. That's their responsibility. I don't ask them to hire or fire anyone.
I've never done that. By the time Daley offered that less-than-satisfying denial, in , he had long since mastered the art of evading questions about clout-heavy firms doing business with City Hall. Many of these deals have involved multimillion-dollar contracts for old chums and generous campaign contributors, often people with roots in the Daley ancestral neighborhood of Bridgeport.
There are the fencing and airport door contracts that have gone to Crandall, whose family ties to the Daley clan go back decades. There is trucking boss Michael Tadin, a longtime Daley friend and big campaign contributor whose Marina Cartage took in more money than any other company in the Hired Truck Program.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in exclusive O'Hare building contracts have gone to construction czar Patrick Harbour, a longtime Daley family friend.
And developer Michael Marchese, another Daley chum, bought a acre parcel of West Side land from the city for a dollar and built a shopping center there.
Tracking other politically tied largess requires connecting more dots, often because it involves former Daley lieutenants acting as hired guns for companies seeking city business, especially at the supersize public trough that is O'Hare.
Jeremiah Joyce, one of Daley's most trusted political advisers, has reaped millions of dollars brokering and investing in concession contracts at O'Hare. Smith lease that enriched Maggie Daley's friends. Victor Reyes, Daley's former political enforcer, has represented companies that have won contracts for major construction projects at O'Hare and for the city's bus shelter program.
Then there are two of the mayor's brothers. Michael Daley did not return a call seeking comment for this article. Meanwhile, John Daley, the Cook County Board finance committee chairman and 11th Ward committeeman, has built a lucrative insurance business serving many clients who do business with the city. The mayor has insisted that everything is on the square in these arrangements because John is not doing business directly with the city.
Through a spokesman, John Daley declined to be interviewed. While that is technically true, it's a "silly defense," argues Bryan Doyle, project manager of AIP, because it suggests that as long as John deals with private companies feeding on city contracts, there is no influence involved. At best, says Doyle, such arrangements constitute a conflict of interest. At worst, he says, they suggest companies "have to get insurance from John Daley in order to bid on contracts at O'Hare.
In all fairness, people who have close ties to Mayor Daley are not necessarily unqualified to do good work. When clout-heavy companies have wound up in contracting scandals, the mayor has often defended them by saying what a good job they did. Indeed, surely one reason they get the work is that the administration trusts them to deliver and not embarrass the mayor with shoddy results. By nature an improver who loathes government bureaucracy, Daley is also said to relish the instant gratification of quick, tangible progress.
If he passes a schoolyard that he thinks could benefit from a wrought-iron fence, he knows from experience that Crandall's company can have a new fence in place within days. At least one former official backs up the mayor's claims that he has no influence in deciding who cashes in on the government spoils. You're talking about a bureaucracy that, like most bureaucracies, carries on its own business.
But other insiders don't buy that line. For one thing, the sheer volume of city contracts that have gone to clout-heavy interests "shows otherwise," says a minority alderman. This is a system in which abuse of the public trust is par for the course. Contracts are steered to friends and supporters.
Yet he chooses not to. Whenever these deals come to light—and they're almost always unearthed by news reporters or government watchdogs rather than the mayor's administration—Daley is put in the awkward position of denying that there is even the appearance of a conflict of interest or that political influence plays any role.
They cannot be clouted! When a scandal causes enough political fallout, Daley shifts from denial to damage control. The standard drill is to "bring in a third-party auditing firm to review everything that was done and recommend new procedures," says a former administration veteran, who then recites the remainder of the drill: "Get rid of a few people.
Mea culpa. He's done. Move on. Over the years, Daley has imposed elements of reform. To promote greater "transparency," for example, all city contracts are now posted on the city's Web site. Smith had paid Daley's pal Oscar D'Angelo to broker its license extension at O'Hare but had not listed D'Angelo as a lobbyist, Daley pushed through a tougher ethics ordinance that, among other things, would fine unregistered lobbyists working to get city business.
These remedial measures are always specifically in response to the scandal at hand—though they never seem to prevent new scandals from blooming. How could the mayor clean things up?
The most obvious, most effective solution comes from someone who ought to know: Daley himself. In his first successful campaign for mayor, Daley demonstrated that he understood perfectly well how to put an end to the kinky dealing at City Hall. The former administration veteran concurs: "You need to have a system that says you're not going to tolerate it, and you really have to mean it. And you set up a mechanism to investigate complaints.
And we're going to come after people who behave badly—before the press embarrasses us into it. Without question, the scandals have "sullied [the mayor's] reputation as a good manager," says Joe Moore, the Rogers Park alderman.
Indeed, if the Hired Truck Program has done nothing else, it has put to rest the notion that Daley is a sort of super CEO in public servant's clothes. Yet what makes the portrait of the mayor particularly complex is the fact that he is said to be genuinely tormented by the scandals. He absolutely hates it. He becomes a different person. He's unhappy. He's stressed. And he's mad at everyone. I've seen him blow up, so that part of it is genuine. But when it comes to fixing the system, that's when it gets a little murkier.
That's where it's harder to ascertain whether he really wants to fix it. Why does Daley not act? What does he gain from shadowboxing at the corruption swirling around him but never landing any mortal blows, meanwhile absorbing the real blows to his image? The legislator puts the question another way: "His politics is always about self-interest, percent of the time.
And he never spends political capital to help another person. So why is he spending political capital to continue to help all these people? Chicagoans have low expectations. Yet with each election, as the list of scandals lengthened, Daley has only gotten stronger. In , he was first elected mayor with 55 percent of the vote. Last year, against three lightweight contenders, he rolled to re-election with 79 percent.
But to some, that explanation shows only how little Chicagoans expect of their elected leaders. Reflecting on his legacy, Daley noted an hour or so earlier that he and his brothers carried on the family reputation established by their father, the late Mayor Richard J.
Daley, even after some had relegated it to the history books. Daley spent the morning of his last day on the job on the South Side as part of his neighborhood appreciation tour, mobbed by well wishers as he visited a shopping center he helped get built at th Street and Marshfield Avenue and a youth football camp at Ogden Park in West Englewood featuring current and former NFL players.
If you don't, boy, it's a tough life, because you have to meet a lot of people in different situations. My theory: You have to like it. And if you don't like it, quit. Speaking during one of several private interviews he gave this week, Daley said he would leave a note for Emanuel.
He declined to reveal exactly what it would say. Wish him that he becomes the best mayor of Chicago. That's what you really want to make sure, that he moves forward, moves the city forward.
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