County office combo on chairman's menu

Daily Herald

July 13, 2006

By Rob Olmstead

The powerful chair of the Cook County Board finance committee dropped a bombshell at the board's monthly meeting Wednesday, proposing that county officials and legislators combine the county offices of clerk, assessor and treasurer.

"We should try to combine these functions," said John Daley, brother of the Chicago mayor.

It was difficult to tell if Daley was serious about the proposal, or if his comments were geared to put pressure on county constitutional elected officials to scale back their budgets to 96 percent of last year's expenditures - something Daley recently did as the county heads into a financial whirlpool of shortfalls.

He mentioned both the 96-percent request and the consolidation topics practically in the same breath.

Pressed after the meeting, Daley was asked, "Are you advocating eliminating three elected positions to one?"

"That's what I, I'm looking at that, yes," Daley said. "Legally, I know the treasurer is a state officer, even though funded by the county. But I believe we can take functions of the assessor and the clerk, and put them into the other office."

The idea is hardly a new one; it has been brought up by various officials over the years. Daley cited a proposal raised a few years ago by Democratic Commissioner Mike Quigley of Chicago, and Quigley in turn credited Mount Prospect's Carl Hansen for raising it decades ago.

For his part, Quigley believes him.

"I believe when the chairman says something, he means it," Quigley said. "I'm going to take him at his word. I'm going to give it another shot."

Daley, however, steered clear of part of Quigley's proposal, which was to eliminate the recorder of deeds office. The tip-toeing by Daley may be more of his recent courting of the black community - a segment his brother needs to keep happy to win re-election. While the recorder of deeds office is held by a black, the offices of treasurer, clerk and assessor are not.

John Daley recently called for a black to fill John Stroger's position as president, and he took himself out of the running for interim president when state Sen. Rickey Hendon began framing Daley's candidacy against Commissioner Bobbie Steele in racial terms.

Representatives of the three offices - Assessor James Houlihan, Treasurer Maria Pappas and Clerk David Orr - were cautious about the surprise proposal, but were generally favorable to looking at it.

"I am ready and willing to discuss any possibilities," Orr said.

But he cautioned, "these are not things that just happen. ... If we're serious about this, we need to do some very serious research."

He cited New Orleans and the federal government's poor hurricane response as an example of what can go wrong when duties of offices - in this case Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency - are combined haphazardly.

The savings of such a combination, while significant, also would not solve the county's budget woes.

Wednesday, Daley and others voted to approve taking out a $200 million line of credit to cover shortfalls for 2006 alone. The total budgets for treasurer, clerk and assessor combined total roughly $72 million - just 2.4 percent of the county's $3 billion budget.

Copyright 2006, Paddock Publications, Inc.

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