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“We’re not New York. We’re not L.A. We’re sure not Chicago. We fix our problems.”
Quick quiz: Who recently said that? Ron DeSantis? Greg Abbott? Nikki Haley?
The answer is John Whitmire, a Democrat who over the weekend resoundingly won election as mayor of Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city and on track to overtake Chicago as third largest if present demographic trends continue.
Houstonians turned to 74-year-old Whitmire, a Texas state senator for the past 40 years, after a campaign that focused heavily on crime and public safety.
“We’re sure not Chicago.” Oof. And from a fellow Democrat too.
Brandon Johnson, who has struggled even by the reckoning of his most ardent supporters in his first half year as Chicago mayor, ought to take heed. Whitmire’s insult didn’t come out of nowhere.
Politically, Chicago comes across to much of the rest of the country as a city that’s off course, focusing not on the issues at the top of residents’ priority list (public safety, jobs, public transit, for example) but on progressive to-do lists. Not only are Johnson and his City Council allies choosing to spend their time and political capital on issues the majority of Chicagoans view as less than pressing, they’re doing a poor job even when it comes to their own priorities.
Case in point: The City Council is about to revisit an ordinance it passed just a few weeks ago to establish the nation’s most generous minimum paid-time off requirements for workers. Business interests, including many in South and West side neighborhoods, argued vociferously against the law to no avail. Now, the council is set to delay the statute’s effective date to give those businesses more time to adjust to its complexities and internal contradictions, as well as to make a significant change to the kinds of workers impacted in response to convention-industry concerns.
Trade Show Executive explained the impact of the original legislation on the city’s critical convention industry: “If someone attends a trade show or conference in Chicago and is in town for more than two hours, they will begin to accrue one hour of sick time and one hour of time off for each 35 hours they work. Even if the employee does not work a full 35 hours during one particular trip, the employer would have to begin record-keeping to track when the employee would begin to accrue paid time off during subsequent trips. They would also have to comply with providing a notice to an employee about their rights under the ordinance after spending only two hours in Chicago.”
Got that? And if the impacted company didn’t do all of this, they could get sued by the employee.
Orlando and Las Vegas must be salivating at all the potential new business.
Business representatives applauded the retreat from that chaos, but also categorized the changes as minimal, overall.
The ordinance still is fatally flawed and likely to lead to needless litigation between businesses and workers. We wouldn’t be surprised to see yet more amendments in the future.
It’s highly unusual for the City Council to “fix” an ordinance just weeks after passing it. Blame the embarrassment on the rush to enact something Johnson promised during his campaign and a lack of subsequent willingness to listen to voices that laid out the practical concerns.
Another case in point: The council recently barred the public from the council chambers during meetings, relegating those “not invited” by the mayor or an alderman to a third-floor viewing station. The antidemocratic move, made in reaction to some recent audience unruliness, drew condemnation from virtually all quarters, including this page.
So did the mayor realize his mistake and simply return to the way council business has been conducted for decades? No, the council instead altered the policy to allow the public to sit on the same floor as the aldermen but only if they register ahead of time. Good grief. Bad policy isn’t made good by removing only its worst aspects.
Even Johnson’s allies are aghast at the performance so far. As 20th Ward Ald. Jeanette Taylor, a Democratic Socialist ally of Johnson, said recently of her fellow progressives on a podcast, “We should not be on the Fifth Floor. … We’re pretending like now we got the power, let us show you how it’s supposed to be done. And we look real stupid right now.”
In a Tribune story, Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, another socialist, said, “There was no understanding of what it looks like to actually co-govern. And there still isn’t.”
Chicago Tribune Opinion
The introspection and willingness to criticize friends and allies is laudable. We don’t see that too often, from either the right or the left. The Johnson administration likely doesn’t welcome the feedback, but once they get over their hurt feelings, they should look upon the “friendly fire” as doing them a favor.
The good news for the Johnson administration is that, while their first six months could hardly have gone worse, they have more than three years left to course-correct. The mayor is extraordinarily inexperienced for having achieved such a high office. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that and moving to surround himself with more experienced hands who know how municipal government works and can offer practical, hardheaded advice. His communications operation badly needs improvement as well.
There’s also nothing wrong with acknowledging that the job of mayor is less about pushing through some preconceived agenda and more about ably tackling the problems at hand. The migrant crisis is a good example. Johnson’s handling of it has been so poor that Gov. J.B. Pritzker felt compelled to overrule one of the mayor’s most significant decisions on that question — the proposed winter base camp on a toxic-riddled brownfield — and had the state take over other functions that ordinarily the city would handle.
More focus on that crisis rather than jamming through controversial items on Johnson’s campaign-promise list might have helped him avoid such self-inflicted mistakes. As it is, he looks politically weak, simply because of the ineptitude. Perception is reality in politics.
Johnson would benefit from a change in attitude toward those he views as opponents. Few begrudge the mayor attempting to achieve his policy goals. But if he doesn’t learn to listen to those who know their business far better than he does about how his initiatives would affect them, this comedy of errors will continue.
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