Heroes and Villians
There’s a new guy in a white hat in the local papers. His name is Forrest Claypool, and he’s cleaning up Chicago’s parks.
But as Manzi told us, “For whatever reason, the media has focused on CID.” The reasons aren’t hard to surmise. CID is where the blood is. Claypool fired about 250 CID tradesmen. And when the Sun-Times’s Adrienne Drell pointed out that both of CID’s underqualified but politically connected top administrators had survived, Claypool immediately demoted them.
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Journalists pick and choose. When Claypool canceled CRSS’s contract last week, that $20 million development went unreported.
You hear it only from CID staff members, speaking anonymously, who feel beaten up by Claypool, Manzi, and the press. Who complain that Manzi studied just 8 of some 500 CID projects, didn’t acknowledge the ones CID’s done right, and didn’t understand how blame should be distributed for the ones that went wrong. Adrienne Drell tried but failed to reach Terry Sullivan, the now-deposed superintendent of CID. Nobody–not reporters and not Manzi–talked to Roger Clark or Paul Martinek.
“That’s the front office. Right. To have a fast-track project, you have to have coordination between all the disciplines involved. Engineering, construction, purchasing, the controller.”
“It was a fiasco,” said Klotz. “[The parks] are one of the most poorly run outfits I’ve ever run into in my life. I’d just as soon do without them as a customer.””The division did grow too fast,” said the same CID staffer. “But it grew with the blessing of the commissioners, the engineering department–everybody involved. I don’t feel it should take the rap by itself. And we did have some wonderful tradesmen. We had some artists.”
I’m going to buy me a white shooting pistol and put her in her grave.
