Defanging Aldermen or Grabbing Power?

After her inauguration on Monday, Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, hit the ground running. Fran Spielman reports at the Sun-Times:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot spent her first day on the job focusing on Memorial Day weekend safety, a broader plan to combat the traditional summer surge of violence and delivering a message of collaboration to a cabinet that is not her own.

“It’s definitely a brand new experience walking into the fifth floor, seeing `Office of the Mayor’ and recognizing, that’s me,” she said.

The mayor arrived at City Hall shortly after 9 a.m. to find a phalanx of television cameras waiting for her in the lobby and a few more cameras outside her fifth-floor office.

There was a good reason for the late start.

“I saw my mom and family off before they took to the airport. … I’m still kind of in the after-glow of yesterday. And it was bittersweet to see my mom go back home today,” Lightfoot said.

The mayor was asked what 90-year-old Ann Lightfoot thought of the inauguration ceremony at Wintrust Arena that turned into a love-fest for the new mayor and her message that “reform is here.”

“She was, of course, proud. But, growing up [and] living most of her life in a small town, she was pretty overwhelmed by the response yesterday and proud of her daughter for sure,” Lightfoot said.

About an hour later, Lightfoot addressed dozens of staffers, including several prominent holdovers from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, before they began two hours of training on two important subjects: ethics, and complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel spent eight years fighting and stalling FOIA requests tooth-and-nail. Too often, that triggered legal battles like the one that culminated in the court-ordered release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video and Emanuel’s private emails.

Lightfoot has promised to promptly honor FOIA requests from the news media and everyday Chicagoans, which would be a welcome relief.

About an hour later, it was time for her first cabinet meeting. It’s a cabinet largely dominated by Emanuel administration holdovers.

“We had six weeks to do a heckuva lot. So what we focused primarily on was building out the mayor’s office. We’ll be placing some names before the City Council next week for nomination to different departments,” she said.

Some of the more than hourlong cabinet meeting was spent getting acquainted and telling stories about “why they got into public service,” the new mayor said.

Her first official action as mayor was to promulgate an executive order to all city departments ending “aldermanic privilege”, the near-total control of aldermen over just about everything that goes on in their wards. That’s a primary source of aldermanic power and is inevitably corrupt.

It only solves half the problem. The other half is that far too much power is consolidated in City Hall. Whether cityh departments will conform to the mayor’s executive order or whether Chicagoans are just trading one set of bonds and corruption for another remains to be seen.