“One City, 50 Wards: Does the City That Works Really Work?“, a joint series from Crain’s Chicago Business and the University of Chicago Center for Effective Government, explores the connections between how Chicago’s city government is designed, how it functions, and how it performs. You can learn more and read other articles from the series here.
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By Ald. Mike Rodriguez
Crain’s poses a fair question in asking, “Does the city that works really work?” Of course, we all have complaints about how the city is working, but let us not fall into the trap of thinking that efficient operations is the only goal or of believing the false premise that a smaller government is necessarily more efficient. Giving residents a voice in how the city works is perhaps even more important.
In its Feb. 6 story, “Chicago’s City Council: How it works and why,” Crain’s questioned whether 50 alderpersons is too many for efficient governance. But the story ignores several relevant factors.
Crain’s rightly noted that each Chicago alderperson represents fewer people than city councils in every other one of the nation’s 10 biggest cities by stating, “Chicago’s 50 aldermen each represent, on average, 53,931 people . . . and in Los Angeles it’s 256,620 people per council member.” But here it omits a crucial piece of the Los Angeles political landscape: Los Angeles has more than 90 neighborhood councils, each serving about 40,000 individuals.
The councils are city-certified and city-funded local groups, made up of people who live, work, own property or have some other connection to a neighborhood. These neighborhood councils must be consulted in the budget process. The city charter mandates that each neighborhood council “may present to the Mayor and Council an annual list of priorities for the City budget.”
That is one city’s answer to the tension between democracy and efficiency.
Another argument is that under Chicago’s current practices, alderpersons have too much responsibility for ensuring each ward gets its share of city services, preventing them from paying close attention to citywide issues. However, this argument does not have anything to do with how many City Council members we have. Many of us would welcome a change that puts that burden of providing basic city services on a city manager or some other part of the administration, thereby allowing us more time for working on policy and legislation. But we have to be careful that unelected bureaucrats do not get more powerful at the expense of elected alders who can more easily be held accountable to the people they serve.
And then there is the debate about how development gets done. Given Chicago’s history, I believe we would benefit from limits on aldermanic prerogative. We do not need alderpersons using their positions to line their own pocketbooks. A recent allegation that one of our colleagues was extorting a business that sought a permit to remodel a Burger King brings shame to all of us.
Certainly we can look at other cities for best practices. I do that myself. But the people of my ward have a connection to me that they — and I — believe has great value. The more people I have to represent, the harder that would be.
As economist Paul Krugman noted recently, although the efficient functioning of many companies took a hit when the Occupational Safety & Health Act was put in place in the 1970s, workplace illnesses and injuries declined. That is a lesson we can draw from as the city’s conversation proceeds on what reforms we make in the name of good government. We should definitely have that conversation, but there is no single measurement we can use to make those decisions.
There are a lot of good things going on in our 50 wards. So let us listen to the people and the alderpersons who are helping to make that happen.