City Hall loathes an eye in the sky. Too many pols and bureaucrats see oversight as an impediment — even worse, the enemy. If they had their way, their smokescreens and backroom shenanigans would endure undisturbed, vote after vote, term after term, generation after generation.
For 12 years, Joe Ferguson has flung back that curtain.
As the city’s inspector general, Ferguson has scrutinized the inner gears of City Hall, exposed inefficiencies and spelled out how operations could improve. He has unearthed waste and mismanagement of taxpayer money, and shone a harsh spotlight on politicians’ abuse of power.
He’s been more than a watchdog. He’s been this city’s resident pit bull.
A sampling of his work:
— Ferguson and his team probed the Chicago Police Department’s gang database and found that police leadership failed badly in creating a more fair and accurate system for including individuals into the database. Tens of thousands of individuals were being inaccurately designated as gang-affiliated, most of them either Black or brown. Ferguson flagged the deep flaws in the gang database two and a half years ago. “We’re still waiting on action on that, with extraordinary consequences to individual lives,” Ferguson told WBEZ radio Wednesday.
— In the wake of the George Floyd unrest, Ferguson issued a report concluding that CPD’s handling of the protests and looting was “marked, almost without exception, by confusion and lack of coordination in the field emanating from failures of intelligence assessment, major event planning …and most significantly, leadership in CPD’s senior ranks.” At the time, we wrote that Ferguson’s assessment should be seen “not as a cudgel, but as a lesson plan so that future crises are managed far better than this one was.”
—One of Ferguson’s last reports was particularly damning. Last week, his team found that the Chicago Fire Department has failed to establish any kind of performance management standards that would allow it to assess, in alignment with best practices, response times to fires and emergency medical service calls. Ferguson stressed that his finding comes eight years after he first flagged the problem.
Eight years. That’s an inexcusable period of inaction on something as vital as knowing and improving response times to fires and EMS calls. People’s lives are at stake.
Ferguson’s last day was Friday. The same day he left, we published an op-ed from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said a selection committee has been assembled to conduct a national search for his replacement. This will be one of the most important hires Lightfoot makes in her first term. The city’s watchdog represents a firewall to incompetence, waste and corruption. City Hall’s long, sad history of indicted, convicted aldermen, taxpayer fleecing and self-serving policymaking screams for someone to continue the job of holding the pols accountable.
How close is Lightfoot to naming a permanent replacement for the outgoing IG? Ferguson gave Chicago a window into that pressing matter during his WBEZ appearance Wednesday. “That’s an enormous question, and it’s shocking that I can’t give you an answer,” Ferguson said, adding that City Hall has been aware since July that he wasn’t going to stay on as IG.
“Here we are on day 104 or 105 since that notice was given,” he continued. “The selection committee has only started that process.”
Early Friday evening, WTTW reported Lightfoot had named William Marback, deputy inspector general of investigations, as interim IG. Still, like Ferguson, we wonder whether City Hall is moving fast enough toward a permanent replacement. The position of city inspector general is far too important to go unfilled for any stretch of time. There’s too much taxpayer money at stake, too many city functions and services that need a top-to-bottom scan from the IG’s eyes.
From its inception, the IG post has proved its worth time after time. The position was created in 1989 by Mayor Richard M. Daley. That decision came back to haunt Daley in 2009, when then-Inspector General David Hoffman released a report probing the disastrous move by his administration to lease the city’s parking meter business to a private company for 75 years, in exchange for a mere $1.15 billion to help plug immediate budget gaps.
Since then, the for-profit outfit, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, has raked in mountains of our cash, and hamstrung the city from changing use patterns of its own streets, even during the pandemic. All the while, City Hall has been groping for ways to patch up massive deficits. Attempts to renegotiate one of the worst deals in the history of urban American governance have mostly failed.
Ferguson took the ball from Hoffman in November 2009 and ran with it, later expanding the office’s oversight to include the City Council.
In her op-ed, Lightfoot acknowledged the crucial role the office of IG plays, and the stellar work Ferguson has done. “Joe Ferguson has raised the standards and expertise of the office,” the mayor wrote on our pages. “The need for a legitimate, trustworthy government has never been more important than now.”
All true, Mayor, which is why finding a new inspector general who lives up to the standards Ferguson setis nonnegotiable.
So is making that appointment a top priority on your list of things to do.
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