Scott Waguespack pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the election season when he toppled Daley-backed incumbent Ted Matlak in a runoff for alderman of the 32nd Ward. But on Monday afternoon the police officer checking IDs outside City Council chambers didn’t recognize the bespectacled 36-year-old Waguespack, who looks like a friendly math teacher or the manager of a shoe store, so he stopped him. If Waguespack and the eight other new aldermen are going to be agents of change in the council, they’ve first got to get in the door.
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In the weeks since the election, hopes have mounted that the council is entering a new, more progressive era. Daley’s own actions suggest that he’s aware that he may have to work harder to get his way. Last week the old council held a special meeting to ram through his affordable-housing ordinance before the new members could muck it up. And he’s been mocking or dismissing critics with more vehemence than usual in what looks like an effort to show everyone who’s boss.
At issue was an ordinance that would change the way the city commissions hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of public art each year. The new law would “streamline” the process, as Cultural Affairs commissioner Lois Weisberg put it during the meeting, by eliminating a pair of selection committees partly made up of members of the public. Instead, the Department of Cultural Affairs would do the selecting, with input from com-munity members picked by the alderman of the ward where the art was to go on display.
“It will certainly aid it,” Weisberg said.
“All opposed?”
During the swearing-in ceremony Monday, the mayor delivered a half-hour speech that included an appeal to the new council not to get carried away in debate.
Except for Rey Colon, who had an assistant sergeant at arms get a few shots of him sitting in the mayor’s chair banging the gavel, most of the veterans left the council chambers soon after the swearing-in ended. The way many feel may have been articulated by the 27th Ward’s Walter Burnett, who recently fought the mayor for a tougher affordable-housing plan but hoped he wouldn’t have to go through that again.
