Division Street

One of the most infuriating parts of Dane Placko’s “Clout Kids” series was the laughing Richard Lanyon blaming kids unaware of the summer jobs program at the Water Reclamation District - of which he is superintendent - for not “taking the opportunity” to make the right connections. You know, like being born the son or daughter of an alderman.

Here’s the text of the statement Lanyon issued in advance of the series’ airing.

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July 10,2008

Statement by Richard Lanyon, General Superintendent MWRD

As the General Superintendent of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago I am responsible for the hiring of our 2,000 employees, including our temporary relief summer workers. Every person at the District must complete a well established process of application for employment. Each person is subject to a vigorous background check and physical exam.

The District’s hiring practices are well within every established law, rule and regulation.

Our summer relief program, a long established one, is open to any one who is aware of it. We consider our summer relief worker program a community service for students wanting to consider future employment in fields relevant to District work; some examples are engineering, environmental research, and public policy and business administration.

Due to the distinctly short nature of the employment, it is not in the best interest of the taxpayer for our personnel departmentto be overwhelmed with applicants. Candidates for temporary summer work are from organizations such as Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, civic education, or community organizations.

Over the course of a 119 rotating period calendar year,we generally employ about 230people. They work in jobs suitable for their skills. They are subject to supervisory scrutiny as any employee. Of those 230 people, a very small percentage may be related to current employees or commissioners. In any case, no hirings lead to inferior employees.

In closing I would remind everyone that the main purpose of the District is to protect the environment, and the public’s health. We do this with an elected legislative body of nine Board of Commissioners who are the public face of the District and we do so with the highest integrity.

The Transit Riders’ Alliance issued another “Action Alert” today urging its supporters to contact their state legislators and express their, um, displeasure at the governor and his budget cuts.

“Despite the urgent need to expand transit, Governor Blagojevich line-item vetoed funding for reduced student and ADA fares and the seniors-ride-free program he created in January. (The agencies still have to provide the reduced and free rides, so these cuts will impact the overall operating budget. Amtrak funding did not get cut.)

“The House is scheduled to meet again this week to deal with the line-item vetoes, but the Senate is unlikely to meet before November.

“Please click here to tell your senator and representative to expand transit, not cut it. We need to expand transit now.”

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“[The governor] cut more than $240,000 for the Downstate Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois, Springfield, and $800,000 to address the state’s DNA testing backlog. Another $1 million to offset the cost of videotaping police interrogations was cut,” Kristen McQueary reported on Sunday.

I thought of this while reading these stories today:

* “Olympic Bid Raises $12 Mil, $37 Mil To Go.”
* “Mich. Ave Riverwalk To Cost City $8.1 Mil.“

I realize the funding sources for all of these things are different, but doesn’t it say something nonetheless about our priorities?

The mayor is defending his forlorn Plan for Transformation, WBEZ reports.

“I said we’re going to rebuild their souls. Not give them an apartment, not give them a home, but you rebuild their souls.”

Oh, so it’s a faith-based initiative.

The Tribune summarizes its examination on Sunday of the CHA’s vaunted Plan for Transformation thusly: “Thousands of families displaced. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Years behind schedule. What went wrong with Chicago’s grand experiment.”

To which I can only say: Duh.

The Tribune used nearly 4,300 words to detail what many of us have been arguing for years - that the critics were right from the beginning, that the Plan for Transformation is a failure, and that it was always about slum clearance, PR, and developers, not about housing policy or the city’s neediest residents.

That’s not to say the Trib’s 4,300 words are wasted; in fact, it’s a fine story. It’s just that the paper is a little late proclaiming one of the biggest feathers in the mayor’s cap a grand experiment gone wrong. Let’s take a closer look.

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Making fun of Todd Stroger - even when laced with outrage - can become so entertaining and commonplace that we can lose sight of the stakes. Now we have a fresh look at Cook County finances that isn’t funny at all in the form of a credit report from Fitch Ratings.

“Even as controversy rages over Cook County’s big new sales tax hike, a major financial ratings service is warning that the county’s fiscal picture is darkening and suggests that a sales-tax increase now may not have been a good idea,” Crain’s reported on the Fitch analysis last week.

“In a statement issued late Tuesday, Fitch Ratings moved its outlook for about $3 billion in Cook County debt from ’stable’ to ‘negative, a step short of an actual rating downgrade that would increase the county’s costs of borrowing.”

That’s a cost that taxpayers bear.

“The New York firm cited weakening county finances, structural deficits in the county’s massive health system and ‘an increasingly high-tax environment for retail sales in a down economy.’

“Fitch is not taking a position on the public policy question of whether the county should or should not have raised its sales tax from 0.75% to 1.75%, says Melanie A. J. Shaker, a Fitch director who was the lead analyst on the report. But she says the agency is questioning the viability of the levy given that, in the midst of an economic downturn, combined with the city sales tax, Chicago now has the highest rate in the country, at 10.25%.”

Here are some highlights from the Fitch analysis itself.

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Ben and Mick at Clout City take a closer look at the strangest and most surprising votes cast on Wednesday in the Children’s Museum debacle.

Perhaps most surprising was Bob Fioretti, who, as the Chicago Journal reports, had at some point even advised Brendan Reilly on the issue.

And a constituent at Clout Street says that Fioretti’s office told him he was a No vote a mere two days before the meeting.

Fioretti’s explanation that the most recent draft of the museum’s design won him over sounds pretty thin, especially given his ridiculous assertion that aldermen weren’t lobbied by the administration. In fact, several aldermen have anonymously confirmed to the Tribune and the Reader that a whole lot of shakin’ was going on.

Fioretti has been an independent force in his rookie season as an aldermen, but he appears to have trod that well-worn path to the Dark Side.

Other surprises: Ricardo Munoz and Toni Foulkes supporting the mayor; Leslie Hairston not. And Helen Shiller isn’t even a shadow of her former self; she’s a shadow of her shadow.

Anyway, go read Mick and Ben’s piece.

P.S. I saw Billy Ocasio with one of those cheat sheets during an appearance on Chicago Tonight about the Olympics; he tried to argue that Millennium Park came in on-time and on-budget. Our mayor can control time and space!

Former CTA chief Frank Kruesi is being fitted for the jacket for the absolute disaster that is the CTA Superstation - and maybe he’ll even do his boss a favor and wear it. But how does Rich Daley escape from responsibility for once again bungling a big project? Paging the IOC!

“With the new expenditures, the project - originally budgeted at $213 million - will have consumed about $320 million,” writes Ben Joravsky at Clout City.

“I remember when the City Council passed the funding for this project back in 2005. A few aldermen told me they voted for it because they had no choice - it was one of the mayor’s pet projects. Keep in mind, the Olympics is another one of Mayor Daley’s pet projects - which everyone, including Barack Obama - feels compelled to endorse.”

(As if he ever opposed a Daley project. Can anyone name one?)

“Let’s hope the IOC gives the games to Rio,” Joravsky writes. “It will be a miracle if this bunch gets through the games without driving us bankrupt.”

Of course, the Children’s Museum is another pet project destined to go the way of the Superstation, Soldier Field, the expensively screwed-up expansion project at O’Hare, the five-years-behind-schedule CHA “transformation,” the massively overrun 911 center and on and on . . . including Millennium Park, whose mesmerizing Bean seems to have put a spell on everyone who thinks it’s the model of urban planning. And all that is just for starters. (The city is TIF’d to the hilt; consult Joravsky for the skinny on that scheme.)

Is it too pat to say the emperor of city management has no clothes? I mean, I haven’t even mentioned torture, Meigs Field, Robert Sorich, the criminal response to the 1995 heat wave, the police department, or Daley’s Friends & Family Program, which conveniently slips the minds of all those Todd Stroger bashers.

Paging Mike Madigan! I think we’ve got a bill of particulars for impeachment must stronger than the stew of incompetence and corruption emanating from the governor’s office.

Let’s take a closer look at the Superstation, just to get a whiff.

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* “Naively, perhaps, I’ve always thought of our cultural institutions as the custodians of Chicago’s better nature,” Lynn Becker writes upon discovering even more deceit in the museum’s PR campaign. “I would never have imagined that such an institution - and for the moment let’s be kind and include the CCM among them - would conduct a public campaign built out of deliberate deception, withholding of information, race-baiting, gutter politics, and an almost pathological proclivity for telling lie after lie.”

* “Now that the ever-compliant Chicago City Council has voted 33-16 to approve the Chicago Children’s Museum Grant Park land grab, the real battle can begin: In the courts, where there are no aldermen who cower in fear of crossing Mayor Richard M. Daley, the plan’s most powerful supporter,” writes Blair Kamin at The Skyline.

* “This is a rehab project for an existing building,” Pete Scales, a spokesman for the Department of Planning and Development, tells Bloomberg. “That’s something that gets lost in the debate.”

That’s because it’s not true.

* I’ve got more on Mayor Hee-Haw and his farmhands over at the Beachwood.

The Tribune has it here.

See how Ben and Mick did!