Years ago I had a neighbor whose husband used to beat the crap out of her. One night her panic-stricken children showed up at my door pleading for help–“My daddy’s ripping my mommy’s eye out.”
Review the record: The Daley administration awards about $100 million in affirmative-action contracts to companies run by the politically connected Duff family. James Duff, who’s white, is charged with racketeering in 2003 and pleads guilty in 2005. Yet in 2007 Mayor Daley is endorsed for reelection by congressmen Bobby Rush and Luis Gutierrez and other black and Hispanic leaders.
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Good services? Back in the 70s New York City was a laughingstock for not being able to run its trains on time. Who’s laughing now? According to a study by Straphangers, a not-for-profit association of public transit users in New York, the worst subway line in New York runs “without bunching or gaps in service 79 percent of the time.” The citywide average is 87 percent (you can read the study at www.straphangers.org). By contrast, 13.5 percent of the CTA’s tracks are under “speed restrictions,” including 23.9 percent of the Red Line and 22.1 percent of the Blue; it’s virtually impossible to ride any line without experiencing a delay, according to the CTA’s own statistics. A poster at the snarky Web site ctatattler.com said Daley seems to care more about collapsible Olympic stadiums than rapid transit and cracked, “Perhaps if the CTA shop sold collapsible trains, etc, then it wouldn’t take me almost 2 hours to travel 16 miles.”
Service will get even worse after the elections, when the Red and Brown lines begin sharing a track through Lincoln Park to accommodate the Brown Line reconstruction. Crain’s Chicago Business put it nicely when it said the CTA suffers from “crumbling structures . . . outdated signals . . . aging railcars . . . peeling paint . . . decaying rails and ties.”
There are about 150 TIFs so far–it’s hard to keep count (the Community Development Commission just approved two more at its February 13 meeting). Virtually everything the city tells you about TIFs (they don’t raise taxes, they don’t take money from the schools and the parks, they’re the only economic tool we have, they’re reserved for blighted areas) is either a lie or a gross distortion. As I’ve reported extensively (chicagoreader.com/tifarchive/), they’re essentially a slush fund, which the mayor and aldermen spend as they like. They’re occasionally used to build or improve a school or a park, but they’re kept from the systems themselves, where they belong. At last count (in 2005), TIFs had absorbed about $400 million a year in property taxes from the parks, schools, county, and other taxing bodies. The mayor’s supporters are proud of the robust development downtown and the property taxes it brings in. But the reality is that the new property taxes generated there are sucked away by one of the nine TIFs Daley has created in and around the Loop. So it’s no wonder your property taxes are rising, even as Daley says he’s keeping them down. (New York’s real estate boom has generated a surplus, enabling Mayor Michael Bloomberg to propose a $750 million property tax cut; but then, New York City doesn’t have TIFs.)
Make no mistake: public complacency about inefficient autocracies has been part of Chicago’s political culture for decades–Milton Rakove’s classic book on the machine run by the current mayor’s father, Richard J. Daley, was called Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers. Only once in the last half century has the City Council done its duty to act as a check on the power of the mayor, and that was during the Council Wars of the mid-80s, when white aldermen waged a blatantly racial war on Mayor Harold Washington.
I said the first step seemed obvious: vote against Daley. She laughed and asked, “Who are my choices?” When I mentioned Walls and Brown, she scoffed, “Oh, they can’t win.” And I thought–so what? Thousands of voters didn’t care if Tony Peraica could win–much less who he was or what he stood for–when they voted for him over Todd Stroger for county board president last November.
