The first City Council meeting after Mayor Daley’s long, hot summer began with a prayer. And not just any clergyman was brought in for the job. It was the Reverend B. Herbert Martin Sr., once chair of the CHA and president of the Chicago NAACP, pastor to Mayor Harold Washington, and the controversial racial “healer” who in 1998 testified in court on behalf of one of the white teenagers who beat 13-year-old Lenard Clark nearly to death for biking in their neighborhood while black. This time Reverend Martin asked for the Lord’s beneficence on the citizens of Chicago–a few of them in particular.
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A couple weeks ago Noelle Brennan, appointed by a federal judge to monitor city hiring, announced that she’d found serious violations of the Shakman decree, the 30-year-old court order that is supposed to ban political hiring and firing in Chicago. For the next few months, she said, she alone will sign off on all hires and promotions, which city officials must swear, under oath, are free of clout.
In response, the city’s top lawyer, corporation counsel Mara Georges, voiced her boss’s shock and outrage at the corruption and declared that she would cooperate with Brennan. Yet Georges added that she would also fight to have the Shakman decree vacated since, apparently, it’s kind of a nuisance.
Within a few minutes Munoz had 16 signatures. When asked if he thought the necessary 26 was possible, a “You’ve got to be shitting me” look flashed across his face. But he said, “I’m trying. I’m an optimist.”
It was a victory, to be sure. Yet evidence was ample that the council hadn’t been overrun by independents when Seventh Ward alderman William Beavers gave his budget committee report–and left out an item the committee had approved earlier in the summer sounding off against Daley’s talk of privatizing more city services. Beavers finished his report and took his seat, acting as if the earlier vote simply hadn’t happened.
