In the last week of June, Mayor Lori Lightfoot suffered her first loss of a City Council vote. By a one-vote margin, the council rejected Lightfoot’s effort to further diminish aldermanic privilege — a council tradition that grants virtually unchecked power to aldermen in their wards.
In the first week of July, Ald. Carrie Austin, 34th, was charged with public corruption. At the root of her alleged illegal acts — you guessed it — was Austin’s exercise of aldermanic privilege.
It was an accident of timing, perhaps, that Austin was indicted the week after Lightfoot’s failed bid to curtail aldermanic privilege. It also was a telling reminder that the roots of corruption in Chicago still run deep and that Lightfoot’s work to unearth and destroy them is far from done.
As a candidate for mayor, Lightfoot singled out aldermanic privilege as a scourge after FBI agents raided the offices of Ald. Edward Burke, 14th. The federal charge against Burke detailed how the long-serving alderman allegedly used his power to extort bribes from people who needed permits or other city approvals. Burke says he did nothing illegal.
Lightfoot made it her first official act as mayor to limit “the power of an alderman to unilaterally approve, affirm, block, or veto a departmental decision, whether such power is granted or required by the Municipal Code of Chicago or by tradition or custom.”
Those last few words are important: “tradition or custom.” Much of what we know as aldermanic privilege or prerogative relies on the traditions of Chicago government, not powers granted in city ordinances. That makes it difficult to stamp it out for good.
Customs are adaptable. They are not creatures of law. And while the mayor had the momentum of a 50-ward election sweep behind her on Day One, that’s not the case anymore. Relations with the council have soured, and her ability to persuade aldermen to give up one of their favored powers is severely diminished.
Unlike her predecessors, Rahm Emanuel and Richard M. Daley, Lightfoot lacks a reliable working majority in the council to get her way on contentious issues, noted Dick Simpson, a former alderman and longtime professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied the council’s voting patterns.
Lightfoot has succeeded with her budgets. She persuaded the council to give her wide-ranging emergency powers to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. She even has won on issues affecting housing and development.
But the recent trend has been against Lightfoot. She needed to compromise on the renaming of Lake Shore Drive to honor Jean Baptiste Point DuSable because she couldn’t muster the votes to stop it. Her failed effort in the state legislature to prevent an elected board for the Chicago Public Schools contributed to a sense of her waning authority.
That was the context in which Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, challenged Lightfoot, successfully, on the issue of aldermanic privilege. He pushed through a vote to remove a section of the mayor’s pandemic relief package that would have limited aldermanic privilege.
The 25-24 vote killed Lightfoot’s effort to curtail the power of aldermen to veto or approve signs, awnings and other matters requiring permits affecting the public way in the city. Reilly and other aldermen hailed it as a win for representative government — for their ability to protect residents in their wards from city bureaucrats.
Then a few days later, the feds indicted Carrie Austin. The bribery case rests on a charge that Austin and an aide beginning in 2016 received a series of home improvements, courtesy of a developer working in Austin’s ward, in return for approving release of city funds for infrastructure improvements and assisting in issuing building permits, among other acts. The claims read like a signature abuse of aldermanic privilege.
Austin’s indictment marks the seventh time a sitting alderman was charged, subjected to a federal raid or identified as a target of a federal probe since 2019. In all, 30 Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption since 1973, according to a tally kept by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Austin is the third sitting alderman under indictment. Burke and Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, grandson of Richard J. Daley, are the others.
Lightfoot has argued that departments of the city, not aldermen, should hold sway over awnings, signs, tree trimming and other changes that require city approval. Aldermen can help draw the rules. They can weigh in on individual applications. But they should not have a veto or unchallenged approval power.
“Voice but not veto” is the phrase Lightfoot’s transition committee used to describe the proper role of aldermen in such matters.
The mayor’s voice is not particularly strong right now. Political miscalculations, losses in the City Council and in Springfield, and a temperament that has caused her to make enemies and lose friends, have cost her.
But on this issue, Lightfoot is right. And the voices of millions of Chicagoans who have endured the unjust, opaque and sometimes illegal exercise of aldermanic privilege should count for something too.
David Greising is president and chief executive officer of the Better Government Association.
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