Mayor Lori Lightfoot to introduce ethics package aimed at fighting City Hall corruption
By John Byrne
Mayor Lori Lightfoot chats with Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, left, as they both arrive for their first City Council meeting on Wednesday, May 29, 2019. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will seek to follow through on her campaign pledge to clean up a City Hall that for months has been rocked by an FBI investigation and racketeering charges against its eldest statesman, by introducing an ethics package at next week's council meeting.
The former federal prosecutor's proposal looks to tighten the rules for aldermen holding outside jobs and would require nonprofits lobbying City Hall to register as lobbyists. It also would give city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson the power to audit City Council committees, an investigative power that until now has been off-limits to the city's watchdog.
She's also pushing for much more modest increases to fines for ethics violations than the city Ethics Board has proposed. Last week, the board suggested hiking fines to up to $20,000 from the current range of $500 to $2,000. Lightfoot wants a range of $2,000 to $5,000, but acknowledged in an interview with the Tribune that further changes could come later.
"First of all, we just got those proposals last week, so we haven't had time to, frankly, analyze the impact of them," she said of the Ethics Board's recommendations. "But this isn't the end of changes that we will recommend to ethics ordinances, this is something that, what we're proposing next week are things that we've been working on for quite some time. Some of them, as you know, are things that have been talked about over the years but have never been implemented. But this isn't the final ethics package."
Her language limiting outside employment for aldermen piggybacks off a proposal former-Mayor Rahm Emanuel made in January, after federal authorities charged Ald. Edward Burke with attempted extortion.
Emanuel wanted to expand the types of jobs aldermen aren't allowed to hold, from the current standard of entities that have matters before the city in which the city is an adverse party to also prohibit them from representing anyone "who has the right to become an adverse party." But the City Council Rules Committee didn't act on Emanuel's plan, saying they wanted to leave it to Lightfoot.
Lightfoot's proposed ordinance will incorporate language similar to what the Emanuel administration version said about adverse parties. "So we're putting some meat on the bone here to say these are the kind of things, but not an exhaustive list, of areas where you take up outside employment or representations that are in conflict or adverse to the city, this is going to be a problem," she said.
Lightfoot stuck by her stance to not seek to prohibit aldermen, who make about $115,000 per year, from holding any outside jobs. "I think that could potentially impose a hardship on some aldermen," she said. "And the issue isn't outside income, the issue is the kind of employment they're engaging in."
Not part of Lightfoot's package is an early campaign idea of setting a two-term limit for mayor or of setting term limits for City Council committee chairmanships.
Lightfoot said she's still talking to council members about the chairmanship caps, which would certainly get serious pushback from current committee chairs who would be hard-pressed to vote to eventually give up the jobs and prestige that come with their positions. "It's not ready yet," she said. "It's definitely something we're in active conversations with folks about."
As for a mayoral term limit, Lightfoot noted the law would need to be changed, "and I don't think we're ready for that quite yet."
She repeated her pledge to serve no more than two terms, and said mayoral term limits are not off the table.
"We will definitely do that, just, we're trying to roll things out as expeditiously as possible, but it's definitely on our horizon to limit the number of terms a mayor can serve," she said.
And Lightfoot said any attempt to tighten up rules about how much city contractors can donate to political campaigns is "a larger conversation that we need to have about not just tightening up campaign donations, but thinking about public financing."
"We're not there yet, I think that's a longer conversation," she said.
New Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, said she was troubled by Lightfoot's proposal to make representatives of nonprofits register as lobbyists, even though the fees would be waived for them under the mayor's plan.
"You're asking community organizations and churches and people to register as lobbyists," Taylor said. "These folks are not lobbyists. These are just people who want to add a voice to the ordinances we're putting in. So they (the Lightfoot administration) got to come back and have more conversations with us."
Lightfoot based much of her successful mayoral campaign around her argument she was the candidate best positioned to reform Chicago government.
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And she's in a particularly strong position to push for these changes now. Burke's federal indictment last week on racketeering, extortion and bribery charges is dominating the headlines. That gives the mayor a timely platform to hammer the idea regular Chicagoans are getting short shrift while powerful political insiders enrich themselves at the public's expense.
During a court appearance Tuesday, Burke pleaded not guilty to the charges. Lightfoot has called for Burke's resignation.
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It could be harder for members of the City Council who have watered down or outright opposed prior ethics packages to stand against this one in the current climate. Lightfoot said she just wants to give people a government they can trust, but acknowledged ethics is at or near the top of many residents' minds.
"I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not recognize people are really focused on this, people are absolutely paying attention to it," Lightfoot said.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @_johnbyrne
Lori Lightfoot
Jeanette Taylor
Edward Burke