By law the mayor of Chicago is entitled to appoint replacements to open City Council seats, and on Monday Mayor Daley tapped businessman Proco “Joe” Moreno as the new alderman of the First Ward and state rep Deborah Graham as the new alderman in the 29th. Daley said he and his aides had interviewed 44 people for the posts after soliciting applications online, a process that left him confident he’d ended up with the best candidates available. “Clearly more people are getting their information from the Internet and in this case we used the city’s Web site as another vehicle to reach a wider audience,” he said. “It was very, very interesting for me.”
When First Ward alderman Manny Flores quit in January to become chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission, observers expected more of the same. But then, before Daley made any announcements about that opening, his council ally Isaac Carothers pleaded guilty to taking bribes from a developer. The mayor, suffering low poll numbers a year before facing re-election, was moved to call for reform. “I think after the Carothers issue, people are losing confidence in government,” he told reporters.
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Two weeks later, as Mick Dumke first reported on the Reader‘s politics blog, the mayor’s office posted an online statement inviting applications for the two open council seats, which he’s required to fill no later than 60 days after they become vacant. After the application deadline had passed, I sent the city’s law department a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all the resumés sent to the mayor’s office. Who would apply? How seriously would Daley consider this pool of applicants? Would he just pick whomever he was already favoring?
Under amendments to the state’s FOIA that went into effect in January, government agencies must forward copies of their FOIA denials to the state attorney general’s office. Within days of my denial, an aide to Attorney General Lisa Madigan (the house speaker’s daughter) ordered the release of the resumés.
Neither the list of names nor the stack of materials included any information submitted by 18 candidates who, according to city officials, withdrew from consideration before the mayor made a decision.
Some applications hinted at the applicants’ clout. Jesse Ruben Juarez, now the First Ward Democratic committeeman, included in his application a handwritten note from Daley supporter and Cook County Democratic chairman Joseph Berrios. “Ken, please pass this on for consideration,” Berrios wrote. Ken would be Kenneth Meyer, special assistant to the mayor. Juarez told me he had an interview with Meyer and Joan Coogan, the mayor’s director of intergovernmental affairs, but no “formal sit down” with Daley himself. “I just ran into him here and there,” said Juarez, who once served as a consultant to Flores.
Many of the applicants were just as reluctant to talk about their interviews. Reverend Marshall Hatch, pastor of New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, has been a vocal critic of Daley and even ran against Carothers in 2003. After applying to be 29th Ward alderman, he said, he met with Daley “and it was very formal. . . . I don’t think I should talk about that because it’s over and done.” Hatch congratulated Graham but added that she seemed to have the kind of political background Daley always looks for in his appointees. “I don’t know what an application process was meant to accomplish if he appointed Graham,” he said.
