Trying — again — to bring ethics to City Hall

How cold was it in Chicago today? It was so cold that when I went by City Hall, the politicians had their hands in their own pockets!

I didn't get that out of a joke book. I got it out of a research paper entitled "Varieties of Official Misconduct: Chicago Experiences," prepared for a new group called the Chicago Ethics Project. Which, I guess, is an indication that these Ethics Project folks have a sense of humor. They need one, tackling a task of this magnitude: trying to bring ethics to Chicago.

The Second City, known for its gangster history, its beautiful skyline and its ugly race relations, also is known for its public graft. Bribery and extortion have been a way of life at City Hall for decades. The appendix to "Varieties of Official Misconduct" includes a computer printout listing 291 officials and employees of Chicago and Cook County governmental units convicted of corruption from 1970 to mid-1987, including 15 Chicago aldermen, 100 Chicago police officers, 50 city inspectors and 8 judges.

A lot of people in Chicago are not particularly bothered by these statistics. It's just the way things are, they say. But a few people are concerned, and they have banded together to form the Chicago Ethics Project. First they got some money together to commission research on the nature and extent of the problem and what (if anything) could be done about it. Then, in May, they held a one-day conference at the University of Illinois at Chicago called "It's About Time!" Now they're in the process of setting up a permanent organization to coordinate the activity of numerous existing groups that want to stamp out public corruption.

That's a tall order, and while I agree that it's about time that some Chicagoans concerned themselves with this subject, you'll have to forgive my skepticism.

First, laws need to be changed, and you know who makes the laws. For example, Chicago's new ethics ordinance looks good on paper. It gives the board of ethics jurisdiction to investigate allegations of misconduct by city officials. But the City Council is exempt! The ordinance provides for investigations of aldermen by a committee of the council itself. The ordinance ought to be amended, says the Better Government Association (BGA), which prepared a research paper for the project. But, of course, it's the aldermen themselves who would have to vote to do that.

Don't hold your breath.

Then there's the Chicago Office of Municipal Investigations, an agency that is supposed to ferret out corruption in city government. The head of the office serves at the pleasure of the mayor — not a situation that would encourage very vigorous investigation of the mayor or his pals. The BGA says he ought to be independent, but that would require legislation passed by the council and signed by the mayor. Again, don't hold your breath.

The BGA's recommendations for action by the state legislature seem to be the most realistic.

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The researchers compiled an impressive body of information on corruption. In the area of criminal prosecution, they found to the surprise of no one that the Cook County state's attorney was doing an abysmally inadequate job. Of more than 600 lawyers on the state's attorney's staff, only seven are assigned to the public integrity unit.

One of the researchers tried to quantify the actual costs of corruption and came up with an estimate of the public revenue diverted by Chicago and Cook County employees convicted of criminal misconduct between 1980 and 1985: $81.4 million!

The bottom line, said Janet Malone Morrow, former vice chairman of the ethics board and one of the organizers of the project, is to change the public attitude toward corruption. "As long as the public doesn't get outraged, nothing is going to change," she said.

But the project's own survey is no cause for optimism. Of 58 community and civic leaders interviewed by researcher Lawrence B. Joseph, only three said they considered political corruption or honesty in government to be one of the two or three most important issues facing Chicago.

One way to change attitudes is to get to school children. The BGA recommends that the curriculum in city and county schools include more treatment of the importance of integrity in government. Another way to reach the public is through the news media. But, alas, no one from the major media even showed up for the project's conference in May. "The media treats the topic of ethics in the political arena in a way that contributes to superficiality and to cynicism," said Morrow.

My own skepticism doesn't mean I think the Chicago Ethics Project is a waste of time. On the contrary — I think it's something that needs to be done. But people shouldn't get false hopes about it.

Morrow said she's skeptical, too. "But we can't accept what's unacceptable," she said. "You don't change it quickly. But it's never going to happen at all if someone doesn't try. It's terribly important to at least make an effort. "□

Recent Lisagor award winner Ed McManus is an assistant financial editor for the Chicago Tribune.

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