To the new mayor: Congratulations — now, get to work

Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot has said the very first thing she plans to do is summon Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson to hammer out details of his plan to combat the traditional surge in summer violence.

But she’ll have a lot more than that to worry about once she’s sworn in May 20 as the first African-American female and first openly gay mayor of Chicago.

The city’s problems are so intransigent, the solutions so painful, you might, at least half in jest, wonder whether to offer Lightfoot congratulations or condolences.

Still, it’s not quite the set-up for a one-term mayor that Rahm Emanuel inherited before using a $24 million campaign war chest to defy the odds and win a second term in 2015.

“The good news is, she’ll have a sympathetic governor, which is much different,” said a veteran political strategist who asked to remain anonymous.

“She comes in without being on the precipice of financial disaster. Same with the schools. There’s a $1 billion pension payment that needs to be funded. But we’re not talking about being pushed off the cliff.”

Following is just a few challenges the new mayor faces:

Pensions and budgets

Lightfoot must find $276 million immediately and $1.2 billion by 2023 to bankroll the four pension funds for city employees. On top of that, the city’s corporate fund has shortfalls of $251.7 million next year and $362.2 million in 2021. And that’s even before factoring in the cost of new contracts and back pay for police officers and firefighters.

Lightfoot has candidly acknowledged the need for a “conversation about revenue” that doesn’t put any more pressure on the city’s beleaguered and disappearing middle class.

She has also promised to “build the case” for new revenue with some serious cost-cutting, including imposing a risk management system; reining in runaway settlements and judgments; drafting a “comprehensive land use plan”; consolidating the four city employee pension funds; making the city clerk and treasurer executive — not elective — offices; and eliminating redundant city services.

Until the city’s “broken” system for assessing property is fixed, Lightfoot has promised not to go back to Chicago taxpayers who have already endured more than $1.5 billion in tax increases for pensions and schools under Emanuel.

During the mayoral campaign, Lightfoot floated the idea for four specific tax increases under City Council control.

She wants to tax high-end law firms and accounting services to generate more money for pensions; raise Chicago’s 17.4 percent tax on hotel rooms to provide increased grants to artists; impose a graduated increase in the real estate transfer tax on the sale of high-end homes to ease Chicago’s affordable housing crisis; and abolish city stickers and replace the $128 million in annual revenue with “dramatically higher” fees on ride-hailing vehicles.

Crime

Keeping a lid on summer violence won’t, by itself, solve the crime that is partly responsible for the black exodus from Chicago. Lightfoot also must boost the dismal homicide clearance rate, rebuild shattered public trust between citizens and police, and boost rock-bottom police morale.

She’s talked about a Mayor’s Office of Violence Prevention to attack violent crime as a public health crisis. But that will take years. Chicagoans won’t wait that long for signs of progress.

Teacher contract

There’s a reason the Chicago Teachers Union has urged its members to start saving 10 percent of their paychecks for a potential strike.The union that was among Toni Preckwinkle’s biggest backers just might be looking for a fight. CTU contract demands include a 5 percent pay raise and more generous benefits; librarians and nurses at every school; more special education and bilingual support; reduced class sizes; and a counselor for every 250 students.

In 2012, Emanuel’s bullying missteps provoked a seven-day strike that was Chicago’s first in 25 years. Four years later, he avoided another strike, only after using an $87.5 million tax-increment-financing surplus that the mayor’s own City Council floor leader acknowledged was “not sustainable.”

Lightfoot has jokingly promised not to “lead with my middle finger” in dealing with the CTU. She promises to be “fair” to teachers and “keep the progress that’s been made at CPS going forward.”

“I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure we get those contract talks concluded before school starts in the fall,” she has said.

Asked about the likelihood of another teachers strike, Lightfoot has said: “Not on my watch.”

Police contract

Emanuel punted this hot potato to his successor. And who better than Lightfoot? She co-chaired the Task Force on Police Accountability, whose scathing indictment of the CPD prompted the U.S. Justice Department to do the same after a federal investigation triggered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. The task force demanded changes to a police contract that, it claimed, “codifies the code of silence” that Emanuel famously acknowledged exists at CPD.

The City Council’s Black Caucus has threatened to hold up ratification of any police contract that continues to make it “easy for officers to lie” by giving them 24 hours before providing a statement after a shooting and includes “impediments to accountability” that prohibit anonymous complaints, allows officers to change statements after reviewing video and requires sworn affidavits.

But an FOP that fought the consent decree tooth and nail and recently filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the Civilian Office of Police Accountability from investigating fatal police shootings is unlikely to agree to those changes. It might be best for both sides to go straight to arbitration.

Civilian police oversight

Yet another item on Emanuel’s list of unfinished business. He promised civilian oversight nearly three years ago, but failed to deliver it because he couldn’t figure out how to do it without undermining police brass or causing police morale to plummet even further.

Now, it’s Lightfoot’s problem. She has already embraced the more conservative compromise proposed by the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability. And that was before a revised ordinance was introduced that eliminated two of the proposal’s most controversial elements: empowering that oversight board to fire the police superintendent and become the final arbiter on police policy.

Consent decree

Lightfoot is in a better position to see this through than anybody, having co-chaired the task force and served as police board president and head of the Office of Professional Standards before that. But it’s one thing to write the recipe. It’s quite another to bake the cake. Now, she’s the mayor charged with implementing the consent decree, keeping it on track and, ultimately, getting Chicago out from under the costly constraints of a federal monitor after proving to a federal judge that CPD can be trusted to police itself. Lightfoot has already pointed out in painstaking detail how she believes the consent decree has fallen short. Now, she’ll get a chance to make those changes.

Ethics reform

Lightfoot has promised to end aldermanic prerogative, the unwritten rule that gives a local alderman iron-fisted control over zoning and licensing in his or her ward. She also wants to give the City Council its own attorney, televise committee meetings, impose term limits for committee chairmen and limit the outside jobs aldermen can hold.

But there’s a reason why Emanuel’s fifth and final stab at ethics reform stalled, even as the City Council braces for more indictments. Reforms always encounter aldermanic resistance. Once again, Lightfoot is likely to have her hands full delivering on her campaign promises.

City Council reorganization

Lightfoot has said she’s not afraid of a stronger City Council that’s more like a partner than a rubber stamp. But she still plans to weigh in on key committee chairmanships.

She has also made it abundantly clear that her longtime nemesis, Ald. Edward Burke (14th), will play no leadership role in the new City Council, let alone reclaim the Finance Committee chair that was his primary power base for decades. Lightfoot denies she offered Burke’s old job to Ald. Scott Waguespack (32nd) in exchange for Waguespack’s pivotal endorsement of her mayoral campaign. But she needs to find somebody who knows the ropes to help get her programs through a City Council that has taken a sharp turn to the left. Waguespack or Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th), whose endorsements were pivotal, are prime possibilities.

Candidates who sell themselves as reformers shy away from political horse trading. But Lightfoot will need to do plenty of it to avoid a modern-day version of Council Wars.

“Managing the City Council will be incredibly difficult,” said one veteran political operative who asked to remain anonymous. “You have an emboldened City Council that will be even more unruly with unrealistic expectations and very little money to meet those demands.”

Remapping the wards

The black exodus from Chicago demands a reduction in African-American wards. Hispanic population gains — to leapfrog blacks as Chicago’s second-largest racial and ethnic group — demand an increase in Hispanic wards. Something has to give.

Lightfoot has smartly promised to get the issue off her crowded plate by punting the political hot potato to an independent commission. But who appoints the members? How many will there be? What are their qualifications? She’ll have her hands full mediating this dispute without a referendum.

Ten years ago, the City Council approved a new map without a vote to spare. It included 13 Hispanic wards and two Hispanic “influence” wards to reward Hispanics for their 25,218-person population gain in the 2010 U.S. Census. It also included 18 black wards, down from 19, despite a 181,453-person drop in Chicago’s black population. It took 41 aldermen to avoid a referendum. The final vote was 41 to 8.

There may be no avoiding a referendum this time. It’s another fight that could trigger Council Wars.

Recycling

Chicago’s recycling rate is a dismal 9 percent. It can’t stay that way. Lightfoot really needs to bite the bullet and start penalizing homeowners who refuse to recycle by switching the $9.50-a-month garbage collection fee to a volume-based fee that charges homeowners based on the amount of refuse they generate.

The Illinois Environmental Council has also demanded a review of managed competition, which has allowed Waste Management to mark blue recycling carts as contaminated — even though that company has a “financial incentive to divert” the contents of those recycling bins to “landfills that they own.” When recycling carts are slapped with “contaminated” stickers, Waste Management bypasses the carts but is still paid recycling fees while city crews pick up the contaminated bins. That forces Chicago taxpayers to pay twice.

The Better Government Association recently disclosed that 514,239 of the recycling bins branded as “grossly contaminated” — 90 percent of the contaminated total over a multi-year period — were tagged by Waste Management.

Recycling contracts with Waste Management and SIMS Metal Management already have been extended for one year.

Obama Presidential Center

Former President Barack Obama had good reason to ignore pressure to endorse Toni Preckwinkle. He needs the next mayor of Chicago to deliver the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park.

Lightfoot has criticized the Obamas for refusing to sign a community benefits agreement to prevent residents living around the Jackson Park site from being priced out of their homes. Now, she needs to negotiate the agreement and get it through the City Council. She’ll also have to deliver on Emanuel’s commitment to use $172 million in state funding to widen Lake Shore Drive between 57th Street and Hayes Drive to accommodate the closing of Cornell Drive. All of that, of course, assumes that $500 million project with the potential to transform the South Side into a major tourist attraction survives an ongoing court challenge.

Lead water pipes

Lightfoot has promised to help homeowners defray the $4,000-to-$7,000 cost of replacing lead service lines carrying water from the mains to an estimated 360,000 Chicago homes. But she has not said how she plans to share a cost that could approach $2 billion at a time when the city also faces the looming spike in pension payments.

The problem took on greater urgency after the Department of Water Management went public with the alarming news that 17.2 percent of tested Chicago homes with water meters had elevated lead levels.

Affordable housing

Lightfoot has promised to strengthen Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance to mandate that developers build more affordable units on the site of their projects, instead of paying hefty fees to avoid it. She’s hoping a real estate transfer tax hike will generate as much as $80 million a year in new revenue to ease Chicago’s affordable housing crisis. But that’s the same source of revenue aldermen are eyeing for police and fire pensions or to replace lead service lines. Once again, something has to give.