Emanuel Overhauls City Board Of Ethics
By Chuck Sudo in News on Oct 3, 2012 4:40PM
© 2011 City of Chicago, photo by Brooke Collins.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel did some autumn cleaning around City Hall today. Emanuel replaced the entire City Board of Ethics today in a move he said was “a new day for ethics and accountability in Chicago.”
Chairing the revamped Board will be Stephen Beard, who has been Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Heidrick & Struggles (a Chicago-based executive search firm) since 2006. Two former judges, Michael Gallagher and Julia M. Nowicki, are on the panel. Gallagher is a former Illinois Appellate Court and Circuit Court judge. Nowicki spent over 20 years in the Circuit Court of Cook County, and is a former patronage monitor for Cook County.
The other new members of the Board are: former first deputy city budget director Russell Carlson; Chicago Microlending Institute director Fran Grossman; Daisy Lezama, interim director of policy implementation for the Community and Economic Development Association; and pastor and educator Mary Trout Carr.
Ethics reform was a campaign platform for Emanuel during his mayoral run last year. Since he’s taken office, however, his administration’s efforts at ethics reform have been hit-and-miss. Emanuel’s Ethics Reform Task Force released a report in April that envisioned a Board of Ethics with greater power, while reducing the role of City Inspector General Joseph Ferguson. As Sun-Times City Hall correspondent Fran Spielman noted, the Board of Ethics would recommend suspensions and firings of city employees, including aldermen, under the Ethics Task Force’s plan, while Ferguson’s office and Legislative IG Faisal Khan would co-exist as “investigators only. The Board of Ethics has never found an alderman guilty of wrongdoing.
Emanuel said in a statement announcing the overhaul, “With a new board and the most comprehensive set of ethics reforms in more than a decade, we have clearer rules of the road and will have stronger ethics enforcement. These nominees will ensure that everyone in public office understands exactly where they stand and who they serve.”