Lightfoot orders end to water shut-offs; calls them ‘a heartless act’

Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot on Friday declared an end to water shut-offs that have cut off a “lifeline” to thousands of low-income families struggling to pay skyrocketing water bills.

Water shut-offs have been the ultimate weapon against water bill scofflaws — a list that, during the 1990s, included scores of city employees and workers employed by other local government agencies.

Lightfoot’s transition team wants to remove shut-offs from the city’s arsenal. The mayor-elect couldn’t agree more.

“Water is a basic human right. And when you cut somebody off from water, you’re effectively evicting them and putting them on the street. We will not do that in the city. That is a heartless act,” Lightfoot said to applause from transition team members assembled at Malcolm X College.

“We will be conducting a full audit of this program. But we will make sure that people have access to water.”

During a nine-month investigation, American Public Media Reports analyzed water shut-off notices between 2007 and 2018 and found they were concentrated in black and Hispanic communities.

The shut-offs stemmed from the fact that the cost of water for the average family of four in Chicago “nearly tripled” during that period, the investigation found.

“When I learned of this, the first thing I did [is] I picked up the phone and had a conversation with the water commissioner. I directed him, ‘There will be no water shut-offs,’” Lightfoot said.

Pointing to a recent confrontation between police officers and a student at Marshall High School, Lightfoot also disclosed that the days of having Chicago police officers stationed inside Chicago Public Schools were likely to end on her watch.

The mayor-elect said she has asked Police Supt. Eddie Johnson and Schools CEO Janice Jackson to find another way to guarantee student safety.

“It brought home to me whether it made sense for us to have police officers as effective first-responders in our schools,” Lightfoot said.

Jackson and Johnson are examining other cities to determine “whether or not we can have other responders who are truly trained to address issues that come up in school with some different tools other than the arrest power,” the mayor-elect said.

Lightfoot acknowledged “some of our schools are dangerous, unfortunately” and need a “security presence.”

“We’ve got to think about what our care model is and what the best approach is. . . . I feel confident that we are going to come up with a set of proposals that we will implement starting the next school year that re-envisions this incredibly important thing,” she said.

Lightfoot also embraced a housing transition team recommendation to strengthen the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance by mandating construction of family units and eliminating “loopholes” that allow developers to buy their way out of a requirement to build on-site units in gentrifying neighborhoods.

“We will be very intentional about how we bridge this crisis of so many units that are necessary when so few are available,” said Lightfoot.

Calling her Logan Square neighborhood “ground zero for the good and the bad of neighborhoods transforming themselves,” Lightfoot said, “I can assure you we will . . . make sure that we are pushing developers to build more units on-site. And we will make sure that we don’t incentivize developers, as we are now, to pay in lieu of fees rather than to build.”

The 110-page transition report includes hundreds of suggestions.

No fewer than 10 committees took the stage at Malcolm X to present their top suggestions. Lightfoot, seated in the audience, followed with comments and questions from the floor.

It was an extraordinary event clearly aimed at contrasting Lightfoot’s collaborative style with retiring Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s top-down approach.

Afterward, Lightfoot was reminded her predecessors also had voluminous transition reports — and that many merely gathered dust.

Lightfoot declared her report would be an exception, even though she’s expanding the number of City Council committees; the transition report proposes reducing the existing roster of 16.

“You know me well. When I led the Police Accountability Task Force, I was determined that our report wouldn’t just be relegated to the dust bins of history. I take exactly the same approach to this transition,” she said.

“These are people who represent institutions, organizations, that are doing great work in Chicago. They will be part of our governance. They will be part of our future because they’re part of Chicago. They’ve laid out in this report a number of different points we can take to continue the conversation and that’s precisely what we’ll do.”