Burke Wants to Outsource City Planning

By aaroncynic in News on Oct 18, 2010 1:30PM

In an effort to balance the gaping holes in the City’s budget, Mayor Daley plans to maintain a freeze on hiring non-safety employees and consolidate the departments of Community Development and Zoning. The move projects $13 million in savings for the city by eliminating 277 positions. The plan would merge six city departments into three.

According to the Sun-Times, Finance Committee Chair Edward Burke (14th Ward) believes this doesn’t go far enough. Burke told the Sun-Times that Chicago should just outsource city planning, saying “There's nothing going on. There's three cranes in the whole city. We have a whole bureaucracy there that is just kept in place with nothing to do.”

As we and others have pointed out before, Daley’s penchant for privatization hasn’t exactly worked out in favor for Chicagoans and has only had limited short term financial gains, at best. While pouring money into a do-nothing bureaucracy is just as good as setting it on fire, should we really trust city planning to private interests? So far, that hasn’t worked out in our favor.