Requiring a legislative body to account for the way it spends tax dollars may not seem like a radical idea, but it was enough to get Ald. David Orr fired as Chicago`s vice mayor.
In a guest column published in Monday`s Tribune, he said aldermen should disclose how they spend the $23,280 a year they get for miscellaneous expenses. Imagine that! Other municipal, state and federal legislators must do this, but in Chicago? If high treason against the city council were a crime, he`d hang.
He also proposed that aldermen account for all the equipment they buy with public money, and turn it over to their successors or to the city council when they leave office. Imagine that! All those car phones and that video equipment and fancy office furniture aren`t theirs to play with forever? The man belongs in Minneapolis or maybe Oak Park, not Chicago.
Orr`s colleagues can`t unelect him as alderman from the 49th Ward, but with a lot of ”how dare you” rhetoric they did vote 31-15 to dump him as vice mayor. Ald. Terry Gabinski, with whom they are much more comfortable, now has that job.
Ald. Anna Langford, who once branded Orr ”a goody-two-shoes,” said he made ”us out to be thieves, low-lifers, ignoramuses.” If so, he had a lot of help; in the last 15 years, 15 aldermen have been convicted of crimes involving misuse of their office. And it was Langford who said there was nothing odd about Mayor Sawyer`s acceptance 10 years ago, when he was an alderman, of $30,000 from a lawyer for whom he helped secure a zoning variation. ”Everybody in here was taking things then,” Langford said.
Current aldermen have called the city seal racist because it has a ship that is presumably loaded with immigrants. When a flock of aldermen stormed into the Art Institute to rip from the walls a painting that insulted Harold Washington, they said the 1st Amendment didn`t apply to them. One of them said the painter was Jewish, for no reason other than to stir up another black-Jewish fight.
Another alderman questioned the ability of women to serve as police officers because of their ”minister periods.”
If Anna Langford thinks the terms ”thieves,” ”low-lifers” and
”ignoramuses” are inappropriate to this bunch, she should use her aldermanic expense money to buy a thesaurus.
