At
least that’s what their intent seems to be. In actuality, the board on
Wednesday managed to plod its way through its public business in as inefficient
a manner as possible.
FOR
THE RECORD, the news reports that will come out of the Wednesday session will
focus on gun control – particularly the fact that the county board approved a resolution
telling the General Assembly to approve a bill now pending to restrict firearms
even further.
The
board also will consider a measure to make it a crime to fail to report a
firearm missing. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says too many people who resell
firearms to people who shouldn’t have them try claiming that “oops, I forgot”
to report that weapon stolen!
But
that activity managed to take up about, at most, a half-hour of a four-hour
session. And it came at the very end of the session.
Anybody
sitting through the county board activity on Wednesday had to endure hours of
minutia – particularly a full hour on the subject of when it is appropriate to
use electronic monitoring on someone rather than keeping them confined in the
Cook County Jail.
THE
CHANGE IN policy is that county board meetings now officially will start one
hour later than they used to. While all the committee meetings that previously
took place simultaneously with the board meeting will take place in the first
hour that used to be the county board session.
It
is good in one respect. It used to be a pain in the derriere to have to keep
straight whether the board was acting as a board, a finance committee or some
other entity.
But
on Wednesday, it meant that the committees were done within 15 minutes. And
that was delayed because the bulk of the commissioners couldn’t be bothered to
show up on time.
Although
they eventually straggled in and a quorum was reached, I couldn’t help but
notice Commissioner John Fritchey, D-Chicago, showing up for business two
minutes AFTER all the committee activity was over.
NOT
THAT HE missed much! Although I think Commissioner Peter Silvestri, R-Elmwood
Park, hit it right on the nose when he said, “the first time we do this new
schedule, there’s no business.”
Even
county board President Toni Preckwinkle was off a little bit, as she initially
started the formal part of the county board meeting with an announcement that
committees would now meet – only to be told by Commissioner John Daley,
D-Chicago, that the committee business was already complete.’
"I’m
going off the old script,” she quipped.
Actually,
if there’s something that the county board could do if it were seriously
interested in shortening its board meetings, it would be to do away with all
those ceremonial resolutions they feel compelled to debate and discuss at will.
ON
WEDNESDAY, THERE was but one (by Commissioner Jesus Garcia, D-Chicago, honoring
the memory of a long-deceased doctor of Mexican ethnic heritage). But there
have been times when they feel compelled to honor a half-dozen people at a time
– which stretches out the pomp and fluff into hours of mind-numbing activity.
Then
there are all the little tidbits of business – such as the awarding of a
contract to Finer Foods of Chicago to provide all the poultry products that
will be fed to inmates at the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, or the deal
that says county jail inmates will now be used to clean and feed the animal
population at the Animal Care Facility, 2741 S. Western Ave. The city will pay
the county just over $323,000 per year for that detail.
Daley
might have been right technically when he said that making the change would
allow the board meeting proper to “blow right through the agenda.”
But
it still is a mind-numbing place to watch politicking take place – not truly
gross enough to be classified as sausage-making.
BUT
STILL NOT the most refined of processes to watch.
Which
is why listening to Daley in response to the county board’s invocation might
have been Wednesday’s highlight.
The
pastor in question who gave the prayer recently transferred from a
Bridgeport-neighborhood church to one in Hyde Park.
Which
Daley – the life-long Bridgeport native himself – said amounts to, “leaving a
great ward to go to a good ward.”
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