Three weeks ago I wrote about the Committee on Buildings meeting that aldermen Bernard Stone and Ray Suarez held on December 7–just the two of them. This had seemed like a pretty thin crowd for conducting official legislative business, and after the meeting was over I asked Stone, the committee chairman, what constituted a quorum, the minimum number of people needed to hold a meeting. He said it didn’t matter, because the 14-member committee didn’t technically need a quorum to hold a meeting. “The only one who can question whether there’s a quorum is a member of the committee,” he said, “and no one questioned it.” Meaning Suarez hadn’t.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Later I looked at the City Council’s rules of order. Committees are covered under rule 39, which reads, “One-half (1/2) of the total number of members of each standing committee (excepting from such total the President Pro Tempore) shall constitute a quorum; a majority of the members appointed to each special committee and subcommittee which may be created shall constitute a quorum of such special committee or subcommittee. However, a quorum of the Committee on Finance and the Committee on the Budget and Government Operations shall be fifteen (15) members.”
I called the council’s Committee on Committees, Rules, and Ethics, chaired by 33rd Ward alderman Richard Mell. The alderman, whose wife recently died, hadn’t yet returned to work, and I was directed to one of the committee’s clerks.
Jason Liechty, a senior policy analyst for Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley, sent me an e-mail in which he maintained that the City Council regularly skirts the law by holding short-handed committee meetings. “Under Robert’s Rules (which the Council uses as its parliamentary authority where not contradicted by their own rules), it is up to the chair of the committee to determine whether a quorum exists or not,” he wrote. “The problem is that they seem to never actually check (or care) if there is one–i.e., they are failing in their duties (shocking, I know).”
