The City Council’s May 26 votes on Wal-Mart violated so many council protocols that even the experts are baffled. “If you figure out what’s going on, please let me know,” says 35th Ward alderman Rey Colon. “I was there, and I still can’t figure it out.” So let’s take it point by point.
“Daley’s no dummy,” says one northwest-side alderman. “He doesn’t want to get blamed for Wal-Mart coming here, and he doesn’t want to get blamed for running them out of town. Instead, he says, ‘Gee, I dunno, fellas. What do you wanna do?’”
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The tradition isn’t dead. It’s just been amended. As most council observers know, part of the aldermen’s little arrangement with the mayor is that he gives them control over zoning, and they give him control over just about everything else. So aldermen are still the bosses of zoning in their wards–except when they’re not. The council voted on two separate zoning requests. Thirty-seventh Ward alderman Emma Mitts and 21st Ward alderman Howard Brookins Jr. had asked for zoning upgrades that would allow Wal-Mart to build in their wards. The council approved Mitts’s request, allowing Wal-Mart to build on the site of an old factory at Grand and Kilpatrick. It rejected Brookins’s request–though only by one vote–stopping Wal-Mart’s plans to build at 83rd and Stewart.
But this time around 15 aldermen voted against Mitts’s zoning request, and 25 voted against Brookins’s. Apparently, the deal was just too big to relegate to local control. “First of all you had all that union opposition–they still count in this town,” says Rey Colon. “Second, this is not some little local thing like a zoning change for a town house. You’re talking about a big store that’s going to impact the whole city. It’s definitely going to impact my ward, ’cause I’m right down the street from Emma. Sometimes you just have to step in and say, ‘No, this is for the good of the city.’”
Perhaps the biggest inconsistency was in the votes of the council’s 19 black aldermen. A few years ago they’d talked of forming a powerful voting bloc. Last week they were all over the map. Eleven voted for both zoning changes, and eight did not. Fifteenth Ward alderman Ted Thomas, a former community activist, voted against both requests. Aldermen Freddrenna Lyle (6th), Leslie Hairston (5th), Shirley Coleman (16th), and Anthony Beale (9th) voted for Mitts but against Brookins. Latasha Thomas (17th) voted for Mitts but wasn’t present for the Brookins vote. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) voted against Brookins but wasn’t present for the Mitts vote. Dorothy Tillman missed the meeting.
The outcome might have been different had Brookins, as Jerald Wilson puts it, “showed his colleagues some respect.” But Brookins brought in his father, former state senator Howard Brookins, and Niles Sherman, former 21st Ward alderman, to do his preliminary lobbying. “People don’t want to be lobbied by the daddy or the old alderman,” says Wilson. “They want to be lobbied by the alderman.”
“You’re talking to the last of the breed,” says Moore, who represents Rogers Park. “Get over it. They don’t exist anymore–at least not in the 42nd, 43rd, or 44th wards.”
