Jackson: As mayor, I'd support Shakman decree

Jackson: As mayor, I'd support Shakman decr
September 25, 2006

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter



U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) said Monday he would abandon the city’s efforts to overturn the Shakman decree if he’s elected mayor — and might even be willing to shrink the number of policymakers who can be hired and fired at will.

“If I were the mayor of Chicago, I would be enforcing the law….I would not be spending taxpayer dollars to subvert it,” Jackson said.

Jackson has formed an exploratory committee for mayor and has embarked on a “listening tour” that will help him decide whether to take the plunge.

On Monday, he held a private meeting with attorney Michael Shakman, who filed the landmark lawsuit that was supposed to end political hiring and firing, but never did.

During the meeting, Shakman told the congressman that the settlement he negotiated in 1983 with then-Mayor Harold Washington was “far too generous” — that Chicago mayors need fewer than 1,000 policymakers who can be hired and fired at will.

“That is a larger number than is justified by the case law….I made the point to [Jackson] that, in the context of a settlement, you sometimes give things up that you wouldn’t give up if you hadn’t settled,” Shakman said.

Jackson called Shakman’s argument “quite provocative” and said he was open to the possibility of reducing the pool of Shakman-exempt positions.

The congressman refused to be pinned down to a specific number. He would only say he was determined to “change the culture of corruption in Chicago and that will require rooting out waste, fraud and abuse root and branch.”

“One of the things Mr. Shakman impressed upon us is that…where political hires can be determined — however painful it may be — many of those people, unfortunately, may very well lose their jobs because of how they were hired,” the congressman said.

During a news conference on the street outside Shakman’s office, Jackson also held Daley personally responsible for the city hiring scandal that has resulted in the conviction of the mayor’s former patronage chief and three others.

“As a chief executive, you can’t pound your own chest for everything that goes right, then point your finger at others for everything that goes wrong. You can’t close your eyes, cover your ears and turn the other way, then act shocked about the pillaging of the public treasury and the betrayal of the public trust going on right under your nose,” he said.

Daley has acknowledged that he should have been aware of city hiring abuses and "should have exercised greater oversight” to make certain everything was on the square. But, he has also denied that there was wholesale rigging of hiring and promotions under his watch, telling reporters, “There were some mistakes. But, it wasn’t all a sham.”

Last fall, Corporation Counsel Mara Georges told aldermen she wanted to dramatically expand the number of Shakman-exempt employees — from 1,200 to 2,850. She said she wanted to add 1,500 middle managers in a “discretionary” category with an expedited hiring process after limited notice and advertising. Once hired, those employees could be fired at will, she said.

Eight months later, Chief of Staff Ron Huberman reversed field. In the wake of the hiring convictions, Huberman said the Daley administration was no longer “looking for a dramatic doubling of Shakman-exempt positions.” And he said he hoped negotiations with Shakman would produce an out-of-court settlement that would make Daley’s controversial effort to vacate Shakman a moot issue.

Jackson said he would decide shortly after the November election whether to enter the mayor’s race. He said the decision would be based, in part, on whether he can convince voters “that corruption costs — that they’re paying for [the destruction of] Meigs Field , that they’re paying to fight federal laws like Shakman, that they’re paying Jon Burge’s pension, that they are paying to investigate Jon Burge.”

fspielman@suntimes.com