Joseph A. Morris, the Republican candidate for president of the Cook County Board, has a proposition: when the Cook County Jail becomes overcrowded, rent boats. “We have riverboats–we could have prison boats. We could take some mothballed commercial vessels, park them at some appropriate location, and march several hundred inmates on board. We could feed the prisoners, give them beds, and take them to the courthouse when necessary. When the glut goes away, the boats would go on to another use.” Morris, a tall, bulky man wearing a gray suit, starched shirt, red bow tie, and Reagan-era White House cuff links, makes this suggestion midway through a meeting with the editors of the Star, a south-suburban newspaper.
“Joe is bringing incredible creativity to this undertaking,” says Larry Horist, executive director of the United Republican Fund, who helped engineer Morris’s capture of the party nomination. “The Democratic candidates in this race are trying to manipulate the levers of government. Joe is saying, ‘Do we need the levers? What are the levers for?’”
He believes these changes would increase accountability as well as save money. “Now people get service from county government, but they don’t know who to contact when it’s good or bad. No one’s answerable. I respectfully submit that even the most attentive and conscientious citizen is hard-pressed to keep track of the array of leaders we have now. That’s a recipe for obscurity, and obscurity is the playground of folly, waste, and corruption.”
Morris has two plans for health care for the poor. If President Clinton’s health care plan passes, he says, “Cook County will not be allowed to pay for indigents and will be come the provider of last resort.” He would then “privatize the system,” selling off Cook County, Provident, and Oak Forest hospitals. If the Clinton plan fails, he says, “Cook County remains responsible,” and he would let the disadvantaged shop among hospitals. “We have a lot of noncounty facilities with empty beds, and they’d do a much better and more humane job for the disadvantaged.” But at a higher price, says the county Bureau of Health Services, which in a recent study pegs the cost of this kind of plan at $612 million more per year than the current program. Given how uncertain enactment of the Clinton plan is, Morris thinks it only makes sense to cancel Phelan’s plans to build a new county hospital, now in the draft stage and projected to cost $566 million.
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Morris contends the Phelan administration has turned the county into a tax monster. He says that between 1990 and 1993 taxpayers were hit with a 43 percent increase in taxes for county services. But Phelan’s office says that in his first two years the county property-tax levy increased only 28 percent, reflecting spending to enlarge the County jail, open Provident Hospital, fix up County Hospital, and finance a new juvenile court building. A 0.75 percent sales tax and decreased obligations have since lowered the levy; in 1995 it will be only 16 percent more than it was in 1992, the first year Phelan’s levy was in effect.
He dismisses a Phelan-backed law banning assault weapons and a recent proposal to curb ammunition sales advanced by Cook County clerk Aurelia Pucinski and Palatine mayor Rita Mullins, as “feel-good measures that do nothing about crime.” He doesn’t see a need for new laws, only for tighter enforcement of existing ones, especially those concerning young people possessing or trafficking in guns.
