TRIBUNE INVESTIGATION

Daley slashed budget of city hiring watchdog

By Todd Lighty, Dan Mihalopoulos and Laurie Cohen, Tribune staff reporters

December 4, 2005

Since taking office in 1989, Mayor Richard Daley has slashed the City Hall department that was supposed to keep politics out of city hiring, even as he insisted that he was committed to filling public jobs based on merit.

Daley cut the Personnel Department staff by more than half and only recently took steps to rebuild the department after being told to by a federal court.

The weakened department not only failed to guard against hiring abuses, but also helped ensure that pro-Daley political workers were rewarded with city jobs, according to court records and interviews with current and former city employees.

The department was responsible for independently creating lists of qualified applicants to be interviewed. Instead, Personnel Department employees routinely relinquished that role to other city officials who dictated whose names should be on the interview lists.

That left the mayor's office free to build a powerful political machine composed largely of city workers--garbage truck drivers, laborers, painters--and others who were seeking such high-paying blue-collar jobs. Armies of these city workers have helped Daley solidify his control over the City Council and aided in the mayor's sweeping re-election victories.

Now, federal prosecutors are alleging that top Daley aides committed hiring fraud by conducting sham interviews and falsifying documents. Authorities said the scheme was intended to reward political workers loyal to the mayor's campaign organization and to get around a decades-old court decree against patronage hiring.

Among politically connected job seekers, it was an open secret that the best way to get a call back from City Hall was to spend evenings and weekends campaigning for pro-Daley groups. Current and former workers said their jobs and career prospects depended on how energetically they passed out political pamphlets, put up lawn signs for pro-Daley candidates and registered voters.

"I got my job doing political work," said Ramon Caraballo, a laborer in the Water Management Department who campaigned for the pro-Daley Hispanic Democratic Organization. "City jobs are political jobs."

Daley image faces challenge

Revelations of widespread political patronage are challenging Daley's carefully cultivated image as the chief executive officer of a sophisticated, business-like government. He has scoffed at suggestions that he is a Democratic machine boss like his father, Richard J. Daley, who was mayor from 1955 to 1976.

For years, the current mayor and the city's top lawyers denied that political considerations influenced hiring decisions. Only after federal prosecutors raided Daley's patronage office in April did City Hall acknowledge even isolated hiring abuses.

Daley said last month that he was unaware of any illegal activities on his behalf and said that his political success was based on his personal performance in office, adding, "My political organization is myself."

Daley spokeswoman Jodi Kawada said Friday that it was "not clear what impact, if any," the reductions in the Personnel Department had on the city's ability to monitor compliance with court-ordered restrictions on political hiring.

Kawada also said the staff cuts in Personnel were part of an overall effort "to increase management efficiency by cutting administrative costs."

The number of city employees has declined under Daley by 6 percent, but the staff cuts at the Personnel Department were far sharper, a 53 percent drop. Daley reduced the number of people working in the department from 178 in 1989 to 84 this year, city budget records show.

During the same period, Daley shrunk the department's funding from about $7 million to less than $5.5 million this year. After adjusting for inflation, the department's budget dropped by about 47 percent.

The cuts came as city officials were insisting that they were carefully complying with the Shakman decree, which prohibits the city from allowing politics to affect hiring for all but about 1,100 of the city's more than 35,800 jobs. The federal decree is named for lawyer Michael Shakman, who sued the city in 1969 to restrict patronage hiring.

Under the decree, the city adopted a hiring plan that states that the Personnel Department "is responsible for ensuring the city's overall compliance" with the court order.

In August, a week after prosecutors charged a high-ranking city official with hiring-related fraud, the federal judge who oversees the decree appointed a monitor to supervise the city's personnel decisions. The monitor, lawyer Noelle Brennan, found that the Personnel Department had "inadequate staffing and resources" to do its job and instructed the city to beef up staffing.

Daley since has proposed expanding the department's Employment Services Division, which handles hiring and promotion.

The division had been cut by more than half to 15 workers since Daley took office. But his 2006 budget would boost that number to 52, bringing total Personnel Department staffing to 121.

`Improper interference'

City job seekers fill out applications at the Personnel Department's office in Room 100 of City Hall or online. Employment Services is supposed to identify qualified applicants and compile lists of those deserving to be interviewed by departments such as Streets and Sanitation.

But there was "improper interference" by such departments in how the lists were created, according to a report Brennan filed in federal court. The report cited incidents in which Personnel Department staffers were "asked to place individuals previously deemed unqualified" on the interview lists.

Reginald Mason, who worked in Employment Services for almost 19 years before the city fired him for performance issues, said one of his duties was to prepare interview lists. But officials from other departments often came to his office and told him to include the names of those the administration wanted hired, he said.

"They would come in with a highlighter and tell me, `Send me this name,'" Mason said in an interview. "They wouldn't even look at the applications."

After he was given a name for every opening, Mason said he would "throw another 10 or 15 names on the list just to make it look legit. ... It would look bad if everyone you sent over got hired."

Mason said he was more likely to encounter interference on better-paying city jobs.

"If you walk in and apply at Room 100 with no clout, you might get a lower-level position like clerk," he said. "If the job pays more than $50,000 a year, you have no chance if you have no clout."

Mason said officials from other city departments told him they got the names of favored applicants from the mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Prosecutors have alleged that the office was the nerve center of Daley's political operation, dictating the hiring and promotion of preselected job applicants with political connections.

Mason said he and other Personnel Department workers did not complain about the outside interference because they were afraid of losing their jobs.

The city fired Mason last year after he allegedly failed to fully process about 1,100 job applications from 2000 through 2003. The city also charged that Mason loafed on the job, often was not at his desk and handled personal calls while at work.

Mason, who is suing the city to get his job back, acknowledged he fell behind in his work. But he said his work suffered because he had family problems and his workload increased after the staff cuts in the Personnel Department.

Glenn Carr, the personnel commissioner from 1989 until he retired in June, was an aide to Daley when Daley was Cook County state's attorney. In court testimony in 2001, Carr said he had never read the Shakman decree and did not know that his department was responsible for overseeing compliance with the decree.

In Carr's department, Carol McGuire was in charge of monitoring compliance with the decree. She also had worked in the state's attorney's office under Daley before she joined the city in 1989.

Carr and McGuire declined to comment for this story.

Mason said his firsthand experience with the hiring process prompted him to join the Hispanic Democratic Organization to advance his career. "I saw how things worked," he said.

Luck changed, worker says

Ramon Caraballo, the water department laborer, had no clue about city hiring when he began applying for jobs in the early 1990s. Caraballo said he went to the Personnel Department several times to apply for a job and was disappointed when he never heard back.

Caraballo said his luck changed after a friend and HDO member, Norberto Soto, urged him to join the group. Before he got a job, Caraballo said, he had to do political work for HDO.

He went door to door registering voters and campaigning for Daley and other HDO-supported candidates. Caraballo said he and other campaign workers promised residents basic services such as tree-trimming, new garbage cans or alley speed bumps in exchange for their support.

"People would say, `Why should I do this? I haven't gotten my alley done.' Caraballo said. "We said, `If we get this done, will we get your vote?'"

Most of HDO's members are Hispanic, like Caraballo, and they focused their campaign efforts on Latino neighborhoods.

"They tried to keep us in Spanish areas. ... Ninety percent of the people, you have a non-Hispanic person, they lock the door," Caraballo said. "If you go to a Polish neighborhood, you use Polish people. If you work in a Jewish neighborhood, you use Jewish people."

Caraballo said he applied again with the city and got a job interview months after beginning to work for HDO.

He quit his $12.50-an-hour welder's job when he became a city laborer in 1996, helping with curb and gutter work for $21.40 an hour. Now with the water department, he makes $28.35 an hour, and he will make even more under a new union deal with the city.

Caraballo's friend Soto denied promising that HDO would get him a job. "He put in an application and he got lucky. He's a very lucky guy," Soto said.

Hundreds of HDO workers like Caraballo have gotten city jobs. Federal authorities have alleged that Victor Reyes, HDO's leader and former director of Daley's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, was a "co-schemer" in the hiring fraud.

Prosecutors did not name Reyes, but his lawyer acknowledged that Reyes is the "Individual A" referred to in court papers. His lawyer denied that Reyes has done anything wrong, and Reyes has repeatedly denied promising or getting jobs for HDO campaign workers.

Caraballo left HDO in 2003 because he said it did not back him for a promotion. He since has joined an alderman's ward organization. "In our job ... if you're not with somebody, you're vulnerable," Caraballo said, citing the fear of layoffs or job transfers. "If something happens, you have somebody to go to."

Keeping `the wolf' away

James Sprandel, a former Streets and Sanitation truck driver, said he also joined a political group "to keep the wolf away from the door." The group Sprandel worked for was led by Daniel Katalinic, then a high-ranking Streets and Sanitation official, and supported candidates designated by the mayor's office.

An aide to Daley asked Katalinic to create the group in 1999 because the mayor's organization needed a group of white political workers to complement HDO and an existing group of black Streets and Sanitation workers, according to court records. Katalinic's group of more than 200 workers was known informally as the "Kit Kat Club."

Katalinic could easily recruit workers to his political group, Sprandel said, because the section of Streets and Sanitation that Katalinic headed could offer a lot of overtime work for snow removal and cleanup after special events such as parades.

Katalinic pleaded guilty last month to a fraud-related charge and admitted that workers for his organization routinely got city jobs and promotions based on how well they campaigned for politicians supported by Daley.

"The machine politics they said were dead are more alive under this guy than they were under his dad," said Sprandel, who retired last year after 27 years with Streets and Sanitation.

City workers who refused to do campaign work or to buy tickets to political fundraisers said they were fired without reason or transferred to work sites across town from their homes.

Left with regrets

William Unterschuetz, a caulker in the water department, said he repeatedly refused requests from his bosses, including Donald Tomczak, to make phone calls on behalf of candidates. Tomczak was then the No. 2 official in the water department.

"My time was more valuable than sitting in a stuffy [campaign] office bothering people during dinner hours," Unterschuetz said.

Unterschuetz said he believes his refusal to do political work led to him getting fired in 2000, when officials charged that he violated the requirement that all workers live in the city. He appealed his firing and won his job back in 2001.

Even though he returned to the city payroll, Unterschuetz now says he wishes he had done the political work, because his fight with the city led to family problems and cost him thousands of dollars in legal fees and other expenses.

In July, Tomczak admitted leading a political army of as many as 250 city workers who campaigned door to door for the mayor and candidates for Congress, statewide offices and the City Council. Tomczak said his group got its marching orders from officials in the mayor's office.

Daniel Braun said he had been working as a painter for Streets and Sanitation for almost 20 years when he turned down a supervisor's request to buy a $100 ticket for an HDO event in late 2000. At the time, HDO leader Al Sanchez was Streets and Sanitation commissioner.

Days later, Braun said, he was transferred to a South Side work site far from his home on the Northwest Side. He was moved back to his old job after he complained to his union representatives and his lawyer threatened to file a lawsuit against the city.

But Braun, now retired, said many other workers bought HDO tickets after seeing what happened to him.

"Show me 10 people that tell you they're involved in politics because they love it and I'll show you 10 liars," he said. "They want to better themselves, move up the ladder."

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tlighty@tribune.com

lcohen@tribune.com

dmihalopoulos@tribune.com