* Right up front let me say that I don’t approve of forcing public employees to work campaigns in order to get promotions, or to get hired in the first place. But this is just goofy…
Chicago aldermen ridiculed and condemned a federal hiring monitor on Friday for awarding $75,000 to the son of the City Council’s elder statesman as compensation for a 2003 aldermanic election that was stacked against him.
Jay Stone, son of Ald. Bernard Stone (50th), got one of the biggest chunks of a $12 million fund created to compensate victims of City Hall’s rigged hiring system.
Federal monitor Noelle Brennan believed Stone’s claim that he didn’t stand a chance against then-Ald. Ted Matlak (32nd) because Matlak had the support of a political army of city workers commanded on city time by now-convicted former First Deputy Water Commissioner Donald Tomczak.
* Sure the odds were stacked against him, but Jay Stone raised just $14,501.40 for that campaign. Did the fact that he was running against the Machine hurt his fundraising? Most probably. But his father is an alderman, for crying out loud, and he couldn’t even get the old man’s support.
Matlak won that 2003 race with 74 percent of the vote. It was hardly competitive. In contrast, four years earlier Matlak only took 54 percent against a much better candidate, Lorna Brett. And, remember, Matlak lost last year, despite bigtime backing from Mayor Daley’s organization.
Yet, Jay Stone gets 75 large. Go figure.
* Here’s Stone’s react…
“It’s not about compensating me for losing an election,” Stone said. “It’s compensating me for political discrimination.”
Cry me a river. I’d rather see employees who were forced to work for Matlak get those cash awards than worthless candidates like Stone. I mean, his daddy is an alderman, so he’s grown up with Chicago politics and that’s the best he can do? C’mon.
* Here’s Brennan’s response to the uproar…
“The compensation isn’t addressing the purported injury that [Stone] should have won. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether or not there were patronage practices in use against him….He submitted persuasive evidence that there were,” Brennan said.
If that’s the case, then a whole lot of other candidates should be getting checks. Where would that end?
* All that being said, Mayor Daley’s comments were just plain ridiculous…
“I guess all the candidates that lost will blame the unions and file a complaint against the unions for stacking it against them, taking political money and taking people off of jobs, so I think it’s silly to tell you the truth.”
* SEIU responds…
“It shows you the level of corruption that has existed in this city that people can’t tell the difference between a campaign volunteer and a political worker,” Morrison said. “Patronage workers are not volunteers—it is a requisite of their public job to do political work.”
Morrison said the only things SEIU offered as inducement for campaign help were “better government, a T-shirt and some pizza.”
Exactly.
But Brennan needs to find another line of work if this is the way she’s gonna run things.