Snowplows clean the streets. Cars whiz down Lake Shore Drive. Shoppers parade past the Water Tower. Garbage gets picked up and people play touch football in the park. Airplanes take off, boats sail on the lake. There are baseball stadiums and museums. It’s all set to peppy music and intercut with shots of Mayor Daley shaking hands, smiling, speaking in public. These are the opening credits of Chicago Works, the public-access cable show produced by the mayor’s press office. Chicago Works lasts a half hour and airs five times a day. There’s a new show every three weeks.
In a different part of the city, one that’s not aired as an example of Daley’s successes, Gerald Earles walks east on 21st Street toward Kedzie. It’s a path he’s gone over, both on foot and in his mind, thousands of times. He’s wearing white overalls and a blue work shirt. He has thick glasses, and his hair is short and snowy gray. The sidewalks on 21st are pitted and jagged. They shoot up and sink down irregularly; at some points they’re nearly impassable. Earles, a 63-year-old auto-body repair worker in North Lawndale, stopped working for money years ago, when neighborhood renewal took over his life. He’s obsessed with repairing sidewalks and planting flowers, paving school parking lots and refurbishing el stations. “My pay comes when it’s fixed,” he says, “to see things looking nice like they should be.”
The city gives out plenty of useful information, but most of it’s about how to access existing city services. In addition to Chicago Works and various department publications, Chicago recently unveiled a new Internet program that provides phone numbers of city departments and allows public-library users to access the municipal budget on-line. Still, that’s very different from what many activists are asking for. Real information, about the actual policies and workings of government, is not available for public consumption, and despite claims to the contrary by the Daley administration, City Hall is virtually inaccessible to ordinary citizens. From the top down in City Hall there exists a policy to obscure public information and to hide the actual workings of Chicago’s city government from its people.
Williams says he enjoys his job because he’s “at the table every day,” attending meetings and seeing how government works. “I see the mayor as much as anybody sees the mayor, and the mayor and I talk about a lot of issues,” he says. “I know where the mayor stands on most of these issues. On most of these issues, I can, off the top of my head, respond to a reporter because I know what the mayor’s thinking is. I’m not speaking on behalf of me, I’m speaking on behalf of Mayor Daley. I am his spokesperson. In order for that to happen, and in order for me to have any credibility at all with the press, I have to have access to him, and that’s access that he has given me.”
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Jane Byrne’s victory in 1979 seemed to promise a more open City Hall, but she refused to introduce a freedom of information law, and government stayed as tightly closed as ever. An independent alderman quoted in Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods said, “Under Mayor Byrne the delays got worse. She instituted a formal regulation whereby any request for information had to go through the Corporation Counsel. This would take weeks; there was this huge bottleneck. Sometimes I’d send a series of letters, and I’d finally get a nice letter back saying, yes, these were public records and they’d give them to me. But if I’d come back and ask them for an update, more recent records of the same kind, they’d make me go back to the Corporation Counsel and get still another legal opinion as to whether these records should be released. There was certainly, on one level, an official policy to obstruct.”
Information began to flow after Harold Washington was elected in 1983–his first executive order was a freedom of information law. Paul Waterhouse, Washington’s second freedom of information officer (the first was Kit Duffy, who took another job in 1984), describes that administration’s attitude as being: “Let’s put things on the table that have been hidden for years. It’s gonna create some controversy and give people ammunition, but in the long run we’re gonna be better off for it.”
Miller believed that a communications office should serve as a direct bridge between communities and City Hall; that the press, while important, should not be the only avenue of translating policy. “The only way that this works is if you have a constant circulation of ideas, of input, from the neighborhood level, from the precinct level, from the commercial-development level,” Miller says. “It doesn’t exclude developers and people who are in finance. It doesn’t exclude the old movers and shakers at all. It just factors them in, along with residents of the tenements, churches, neighborhood organizations, activist groups, and so forth. He honestly believed that if you have a myriad of these mediating influences at all levels of your community, with multiple associations, then your contribution becomes part of the best solution.”
