Role of the Mayor

The Mayor of the City of Chicago is responsible for:

• Approving / vetoing city council ordinances and has a line item veto power over appropriations bills.
• Since he's responsible for submitting a budget and has line item power, the Mayor has the power of the purse.
• The Mayor is also responsible for appointments to City Boards:
• Education
• City Colleges of Chicago
• Chicago Housing Authority
• Park District
• Public Library
• CTA (4 of 7 members)- uncertain but he may pick the chairman
• RTA (5 of 16 members)
• Public Building Commission (6 of 11 members) - he himself is currently the Chairman, not sure if that belings to the Mayor or he appointed himself Chairman
• *International Port District (4 or 5 of 9 members) - Mayor's site says 4, IL Port Site says 5. The balance are appointed by the Governor.
• Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (7 of 13 members)
• The Mayor is responsible for picking the Police Superintendent and the Fire Commissioner.

My sources for the above (and I have to admit that some of these sources are severely lacking):

Mayor's Website

Chicago Tribune

RTA Website

Public Building Commission Site

Illinois International Port Site

So to boil down what the Mayor is responsible for and has his hands in, he must:

1. Be a good competent manager and delegate well. He has to be able to pick managers who can drive results. But he is ultimately responsible because he puts them in their jobs.
2. He is responsible for city ordinances - he vetoes or approves them. And it requires the city council to override with a 2/3 majority. Short of that condition, he's responsible.
3. He "controls" outright the CPS, City Colleges, CHA, Park District, Public Library.
4. He "controls" through majority appointment CTA, PBC (he's chairman), MPEA, and possibly IIPD.

If any of the above are deficient in the city of Chicago, Mayor Daley is responsible for not replacing the heads or providing new direction after a certain period of time.

The most straightforward approach this is to go through these different areas, plus understand certain city ordinances and render a judgement.

Daley Evaluation Framework

I'm evaluating whether Mayor Daley is "good or bad." I think this boils down to two fundamental questions:

#1- Is Mayor Daley a net positive or a net negative?

#2- Is Mayor Daley the best option we have?

Question #1 is important, if he's a net negative we should want to replace him. But in a vacuum of political or management talent, he may be the best we have.

Fair Disclosure- I'm biased against Daley. For the purposes of this analysis I think I will be fine to put that bias aside since I like to document and record where conclusions and proof come from. But going in to this I should state where I stand on this. I think Daley is probably a net positive. Some of this may be because of the way the Chicago political machine operates and so he is uber-effective- and he probably is a competent manager. However I think someone not so politically connected would rely less on cronies to get the job done, perhaps increasing the effectiveness of municipal government across the board. Fairer bidding for contracts, more competition for licences, etc. But the data will bear this out.

A couple major tasks/work streams to be addressed:

#1- What is the official role of the Mayor? Does Daley accomplish this (Poorly, Well, Fantastically)?

#2- Was the Olympic bid a good use of city / private citizen resources?

#3- The parking meter deal.

#4- Is he dirty? And if not, why is he content to let people think he is? Why are the feds investigating him?

#5- Where is he leading the city? Is he doing this as well as can be asked (if he's as big a dictator as everyone assumes, could he be doing more)?

I think answering/ addressing these issues leads us to the answers for Question #1 and #2. As you can see, these 5 issues in and of themselves require frameworks or approaches to address. #2 and #3 are current as well- so there may be things that are added and the relevance of them may diminish over time. But as examples of decision making- since Daley's been in office for 20 years, one would hope that if these were colossally bad decisions, someone with his experience would not still be making these.

Recommitting to the Blog - Update

So this was the second long term, unplanned, hiatus I've taken. I hope it will not happen again (but it will). I got behind updating my candidate evals and then the race was over very quickly after that. I've since moved to the South Loop and work had me out of town for two months which made things very busy. Ultimately I ranked my final choice of candidates as follows:

#1 Wheelan

#2 Quigley

#3 Fritchey

But I really, REALLY preferred the top 2 over Fritchey. But I'd like to see Jan Donatelli keep at it and run for an office in the future when she is more prepared. So all in all, a good result and I'm really glad Mike Quigley is the US representative from my former district.

What made me update with a post was a Facebook comment a friend made. It was right up the alley of what I wanted to do with this blog. Everyone seems to hate Daley, why? I have to admit, I don't have many concrete reasons - certainly not enough that justify my conviction that this city would be better off without him. So to get back into the swing of things I am going to to try to answer the question of whether Daley is good or bad. This is remarkably vague and subjective so I will try to apply a framework to my evaluation. This will also be a large undertaking but ultimately will be worth it. It will also likely not have a nice neat ending to it. Daley's in office, month to month, year to year, a cost-benefit analysis of his administration may result in conflicting results.