Illinois Government Consultants Incorporated

Chicago taxpayers will pay a $7.5 million price in the next few years for former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s decision to require city employees to take unpaid furlough days and accept comp time instead of cash overtime, the city’s inspector general has concluded.

At the end of 2010, the accumulated balance of comp time hours owed to city employees — not including police officers, firefighters, paramedics and Inspector General employees — had ballooned to 201,000 hours, a 144 percent increase from the 140,000-hour balance in 2008, said Inspector General Joe Ferguson.

That’s a $7.5 million “liability” that Chicago taxpayers will be “obligated to pay over the next several years,” Ferguson said.

“This illustrates that a major effect of the substitution of compensatory time for overtime pay is to postpone the cost of overtime — either in payments to city employees or in paid time off — to future years,” the inspector general wrote in a report released Wednesday.

“Regardless of whether the city has to pay for these hours directly or give employees paid time off, the cost to the city whether in cash or lost productivity is the same. … This is a significant future obligation that should be factored into and publicly disclosed as a consequence of furlough as a budget strategy.”

Contrary to his own prior reports, Ferguson also concluded that the furlough plan dramatically reduced overtime. He did not detail whether that savings in overtime offset any of the comp time liability.

Although key departments were forced to operate short-handed while co-workers took unpaid days off, overtime payments through June 30, 2010 in six key departments — Streets and Sanitation, Transportation, Water Management, Aviation, Fleet Management and General Services — declined by 24 percent over the same period the year before.

In each of the last two years, city employees were required to take the equivalent of 24 unpaid days off and substitute comp time for cash overtime.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has condemned the furlough days as a “morale killer” and ended them for the entire city workforce. That blew a $31 million hole in the city’s 2011 budget that the new mayor plans to fill with 625 layoffs now that union leaders have spurned his demand for cost-saving work rule changes.

In earlier studies, Ferguson concluded that, although the furlough plan cut costs, the savings was actually $11 million less than Daley claimed because of the liability absorbed by grossly under-funded city employee pension funds.

The inspector general also complained that Chicago Fire Department brass got more than $335,000 in overtime they were not eligible for over the last two years, wiping out the benefits from the furlough plan.

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Source:  The Chicago Sun-Times

The U.S. Senate has approved more than $146 million for military construction projects in Illinois.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin says the projects were included in President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget.

The money has been slated to fund a $10 million training and support facility for the Army National Guard in Normal and changes to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Army Reserve Center in the southern Chicago suburb of Homewood.

Durbin’s office also says $12.8 million will be used for the Army Reserve Center in Rockford.

The largest chunk of money, more than $107 million, will be used for a new heating system and health clinic at the Great Lakes Naval Station in northern Illinois. 

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Source:  The State Journal Register - The Oldest Newspaper in Illinois

A few days ago, former President Bill Clinton identified a constitutional escape hatch should President Obama and Congress fail to come to terms on a deficit reduction plan before the government hits its borrowing ceiling.

He pointed to an obscure provision in the 14th Amendment, saying he would unilaterally invoke it “without hesitation” to raise the debt ceiling, “and force the courts to stop me.”

On Friday, Mr. Obama rejected the idea, though not in categorical terms.

“I have talked to my lawyers,” Mr. Obama said. “They are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.”

Adding another element of uncertainty, and possible court battles, to the debate do not seem to appeal to the White House. And it is, in any event, not clear that the nation’s creditors would continue to lend money to the United States were the president to take unilateral action.

The provision in question, Section 4 of the amendment, was meant to ensure the payment of Union debts after the Civil War and to disavow Confederate ones. But it was written in broader terms.

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,” the critical sentence says, “shall not be questioned.”

The Supreme Court has said in passing that those words have outlived the historical moment that gave rise to them.

“While this provision was undoubtedly inspired by the desire to put beyond question the obligations of the government issued during the Civil War,” Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for the court in 1935, “its language indicates a broader connotation.”

In recent weeks, law professors have been trying to puzzle out the meaning and relevance of the provision. Some have joined Mr. Clinton in saying it allows Mr. Obama to ignore the debt ceiling. Others say it applies only to Congress and only to outright default on existing debts. Still others say the president may do what he wants in an emergency, with or without the authority of the 14th Amendment.

The words of the provision are in important ways quite vague. “Nobody would argue,” said Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, “that Section 4 is clear in its meaning, other than at the time everyone thought that the South, if they ever got back in control, would not pay Civil War debt.”

But Jack M. Balkin, a law professor at Yale, said it was possible to infer a broader principle.

“You’re not supposed to hold the validity of the public debt hostage to achieve political ends,” Mr. Balkin said. He added, though, that “Section 4 is a fail-safe that only comes into operation when everything else is exhausted.”

Mr. Obama’s statement largely dismissing the possibility of invoking the provision may have had a strategic element to it. A deficit reduction deal would seem to be more likely, after all, if both sides thought there was no alternative but economic chaos.

Mr. Obama’s reference to “a winning argument” suggested the likelihood that the courts would weigh in if he took unilateral action. But that is not certain.

“This is not a circumstance,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, “in which the courts have any plausible point of entry.”

Professor Balkin agreed. “This is largely a political question,” he said. “It is unlikely courts would decide these questions.”

Some law professors have put forward possible legal claims that might overcome threshold requirements for lawsuits, like the one in which plaintiffs show that they have been directly injured and so have standing to sue. “It’s unthinkable,” Professor Tribe responded, “that the courts would allow a gimmicky lawsuit to proceed.”

The president, moreover, can move quickly, but court cases take time. “At the point at which the economy is melting down, who cares what the Supreme Court is going to say?” Professor Balkin said. “It’s the president’s duty to save the Republic.”

Another possible reaction to unilateral action from Mr. Obama is impeachment. Professor Tribe said that was “not politically a very plausible scenario.”

Professor Levinson was less certain. Impeachment by the House of Representatives “seems to me quite likely.” But, he added, “it is also literally unimaginable that the Senate would convict.”

A third possible response is what some law professors call “popular constitutionalism.” The meaning of the Constitution, these professors say, is in the end what the public believes it to be. The president and members of Congress may thus pay a political price for taking stands at odds with what the public understands to be their constitutional obligations.

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Source:  The New York Times

The protracted, clout-heavy fight over a multi-million dollar contract to run the restaurants and stores in O’Hare airport’s international terminal moved a step closer to being resolved today.

The City Council Aviation Committee endorsed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recommendation by voting for a contract with Westfield Concession Management LLC, a subsidiary of multinational shopping mall and concessions developer the Westfield Group.

As she has at prior hearings on the O’Hare plans, Aviation Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino testified that Westfield – which runs concessions at several airports around the country — provides the most realistic revenue projections.

Aviation Committee Chairman Ald. Michael Zalewski, 23rd, read letters from officials at both United and American Airlines in support of the Westfield pact.

The 25-year Westfield proposal guarantees the city at least $5.1 million in annual rent as well as $26.2 million in renovations and new construction to the concession area.

If approved by the City Council next week, Westfield will replace Chicago Aviation Partners, the company with ties to former Mayor Richard Daley that has run terminal 5 concessions since 1993.

Aldermen were close to voting on the O’Hare contract near the end of Daley’s term, until Emanuel sent word he wanted a chance to review the proposals after taking office. Emanuel came out in support of Westfield early this month.

The committee vote was 14-1, with Ald. John Arena, 45th, the lone dissenter. Arena said aldermen didn’t have time to accurately assess the bids, because information on the plans was only released to them by the Emanuel Administration this week.

“I just wasn’t convinced the process was clear and transparent. The numbers just didn’t add up for me,” Arena said.

Both CAP and Westfield have City Hall connections.

Westfield’s lobbying team includes Tim Dart, brother of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and Demetrius Carney, president of the Chicago Police Board.

Among CAP’s shareholders is Jeremiah Joyce, one of Daley’s closest political advisers. Former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Devine lobbies for the group.

Joyce, a former alderman and state senator who has kept a low public profile in recent years, testified briefly. He urged aldermen to look closer at the proposals.

“You have this hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo numbers thing going on,” Joyce said. “And if I sat where you guys sat – or ladies – I would ask for some sort of a forensic audit on these projections and find out what the numbers really are.”

And Devine argued CAP’s $11.5 million annual minimum rent guarantee is far from the pie-in-the-sky promise Westfield supporters have said it is. But city officials have said CAP has always fallen short of revenue projections under its current contract.

As the high profile O’Hare contract moved toward a vote by the full City Council, Emanuel’s office also announced they will enact previously discussed initiatives the administration says will make contract bidding more transparent and competitive.

Open online bidding for city contracts will allow companies to repeatedly bid against each other, driving down costs, according to a news release from Emanuel’s office.

And contracts to be awarded without open bidding will be posted online before the city’s Non-Competitive Review Board votes on them, to allow public comment.

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune

Several Illinois communities will get nearly $5 million in grants to reduce the amount of pollution running into the state’s waterways.

They’re called Green Infrastructure Grants and entities apply in one of three categories — combined sewer overflow, storm retention and infiltration, and small projects.

The money was announced Thursday by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

More than a dozen communities and entities will get the grants.

They include the city of Joliet, which is getting $820,000 for footing tile separation program, and the city of Danville, which will receive $750,000 for a high school campus improvement project.

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Source:  The State Journal Register - The Oldest Newspaper in Illinois

The federal debt ceiling debate is already complicating life for state and local governments.

Maryland is postponing a bond sale that had been scheduled for Friday, after the state was warned that its credit rating would probably be lowered in the event of a federal downgrade. California, which typically issues short-term bonds at this time of year, is working to arrange bank loans instead, citing the market uncertainty. And state officials across the nation are trying to figure out what will happen to the federal payments they rely on for everything from Medicaid to unemployment to highway construction if a deal is not reached to raise the debt ceiling by the Aug. 2 deadline.

States whose economies rely on the federal government — including Maryland and Virginia, home to many federal employees and contractors — are at the greatest risk if there is no agreement and Washington has to decide which payments to make and which to skip. They were among the states warned by Moody’s Investors Service this week that their credit ratings were being jeopardized by Washington — which would make it more expensive for them to borrow for costs like construction, through no fault of their own.

“For nearly 75 years we have worked hard to earn the highest credit ratings from all three rating agencies,” Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a Republican, wrote this week to President Obama and members of Congress, urging them to raise the debt limit. “Now your failure to get the job done is hurting the businesses and citizens of our commonwealth.”

Many state and local officials are still hoping that a deal will be reached, averting a situation in which federal payments to the states could start to be cut in August. But a number of states have begun preparing for the worst.

Ric Brown, Virginia’s secretary of finance, said that it was a difficult task, made much more difficult by the lack of concrete information coming from Washington. “What you’ve got at the federal level, let’s face it, is outright chaos,” he said in an interview. “It’s hard to make sense out of that.”

In Maryland, the uncertainty over what will happen in Washington is complicating the state’s plans to sell bonds for school construction and to refinance some existing debt. The sale was pushed back to Monday after the state was warned that the debt ceiling debate could harm its credit rating.

Of course, if the debt limit is not raised and the federal government cannot meet all its costs, states and localities will face a new set of more serious problems. The National Conference of State Legislatures told members this week that there was little experience to guide their many “what if” questions, citing instead “a potpourri of ‘coulds,’ ” including the possibility that the federal government could pay its debts in the order in which they were received, or could prioritize which payments to make.

If the federal government were to stop paying some employees or contractors next month, or were to hold back Social Security checks, it could have a “profound effect on state and local tax revenues,” according to a report issued this week by the Pew Center on the States. On top of that, a delay in the payments that states and local governments rely on would pose cash-flow problems for many states. The Pew report noted that the federal government owed $10.4 billion in tuition assistance next month, when the academic year begins.

August is also the peak of the road construction season. In June, the states got $4 billion worth of reimbursements for transportation projects from the federal government, said Jack Basso, the director of program finance and management for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Now the association is trying to figure out whether money in the highway trust fund — which comes mostly from the federal gas tax — would be protected if the debt limit were not raised.

An interruption in payments would put states in a bind, Mr. Basso said, since they use the money to pay private contractors. “They would have to face ‘How are we going to pay our bills?’ ” Mr. Basso said.

California had been preparing to issue $5 billion worth of short-term bonds next month, but now its treasurer, Bill Lockyer, is seeking to put together a bridge loan with banks instead.

“Given the situation in Washington, the treasurer decided it would be prudent to develop a contingency plan, a Plan B,” said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman.

Mayors are also watching the debate in Washington nervously. Several said in interviews that they were not worried in the short term. But some, including Mayor Ralph Becker of Salt Lake City, said they were worried about the general economic harm that a federal default would cause. “We all fear and see the specter, the dark clouds that would hide our beautiful blue skies and mountains,” he said. “It’s hanging over us.”

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Source:  The New York  Times

A new questionnaire that probes the “soft skills” needed be a teacher has resulted in what critics call the “blacklisting’’ of hundreds of potential Chicago Public School teachers — including some who already had job offers, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

Graduates of the Academy for Urban School Leadership’s teacher training program touted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel have, in effect, flunked the test. So has a winner of a prestigious Golden Apple scholarship. Likewise a special-education major who made the dean’s list at Michigan State University and was described as a “dream candidate’’ by a CPS principal who wanted to hire her.

Of the 3,900 CPS teacher applicants who have taken TeacherFit since June, 30 percent have scored low enough to be excluded from hiring — for the moment, said Alicia Winckler, head of the CPS Office of Human Capital. Some were told to reapply in 18 months, but CPS is now rethinking that 18-month time-frame and whether to grant some low-scoring applicants some leeway, Winckler said.

Winckler and a spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Education Fund, which spent $130,000 to develop TeacherFit for CPS use, say they believe strongly in TeacherFit’s validity and ability to identify strong teacher candidates. They note that similar personality-test-like job application questionnaires are common in the business world.

However, deans of 22 Chicago area colleges of education are requesting a meeting with CPS officials over the use of TeacherFit as a tool that can completely knock a candidate out of the CPS teacher applicant pool, said Victoria Chou, dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“It’s smelling bad so far,’’ said Chou, who called some of the TeacherFit questions “crazy.’’ “I cannot help but think there hasn’t been enough evaluation undertaken before these high stakes are put into place.’’

The Chicago Teachers Union is asking CPS to dump the test completely, said CTU President Karen Lewis.

“It’s unacceptable,’’ said Lewis. “Any test can inform [the application process] but it shouldn’t drive it.’’

“No one should be blacklisted, in 1950s talk, simply because they didn’t score appropriately,’’ agreed John Butterfield, a former CPS principal and now assistant to the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. The association plans to “lodge a complaint’’ with Winckler, he said.

“I don’t think anyone’s career should be up or down based on one test,’’ Butterfield said.

Butterfield, Chou and other area deans of education say their email and phone lines have lit up since last week, when CPS teacher applicants started to be notified that their TeacherFit responses had knocked them out of the applicant pool — including some who had already been offered CPS jobs.

Sandy Traback, interim principal at Kozminski, said that only a few weeks before year-round classes start she was blocked from hiring a “dream candidate’’ who had two other CPS job offers as a special education teacher because of TeacherFit scores.

The candidate had made the Dean’s list at Michigan State and had received rave reviews from supervisors at two different CPS schools where she had student-taught and taught summer school. Traback even personally observed her summer school teaching and was impressed.

“Everybody said, ‘If you need a special education teacher, this is the one you want,’ ” Traback said.

But with the candidate sitting across her desk, Traback tried to select her on the CPS computer system and couldn’t find her application. She called CPS Human Resources, only to be told “she didn’t pass the TeacherFit evaluation. And I said, ‘what the hell is that?’ ”

“I could actually watch her teach,’’ Traback said. “I saw the quality of the work she was doing. . . . I am very concerned that some candidates have been caught up in this, and it’s going to be a loss to CPS.’’

The candidate — and many others — said she thought she was merely taking a survey when she filled out TeacherFit. She had no idea her career would rest on her answers, she said.

“Had I known, I might not have been as honest,” and instead given the answers she thought test evaluators were seeking, said the candidate, who asked to remain anonymous.

The CTU’s Lewis said the union complained about some questions during the TeacherFit development process because some seemed to probe for people who were “willing to work for free.’’ One current question asks candidates “how do you feel about a job that would require you to regularly work after hours?”

Other questions ask candidates to recall how frequently they did something — such as help their peers with a difficult task — over a 10- or five-year time frame. A 10-year span would take a 21-year-old teaching candidate all the way back to age 11, one education professor noted.

TeacherFit co-author Neal Schmitt, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, said many of the questions involve “personality or attitude’’ items that try to get at the “soft skills’’ needed to be a teacher — student focus, planning and organizing, results-focus, perseverance and self-initiative.

Development of the test was paid for by the Chicago Public Education Fund, which counts as a board member Bruce Rauner, a wealthy venture capitalist and close ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Rauner was a driving force behind the sweeping school reform bill that Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law last month.

Penny Pritzker, a member of the billionaire Pritzker family, stepped down as the fund’s chair after Emanuel named her a Chicago School Board member.

TeacherFit questions were field-tested on a sample pool of 867 CPS teachers, with an average work experience of four years, who were also rated separately by their principals. TeacherFit scores wound up correlating closely with how teachers were rated by their principals, Schmitt said.

However, CPS ultimately decided which scores would fall into what CPS calls a “red, yellow or green’’ category, with “red” being the lowest score, and what stakes to attach to results, Schmitt said.

North suburban academic powerhouse Stevenson High School also uses TeacherFit as a candidate evaluation tool, but not a blacklisting device, said Stevenson Township High School District spokesman James Conrey.

“No current candidate at Stevenson is excluded from consideration based solely on TeacherFit answers, and no future candidate will be excluded based solely on TeacherFit answers,’’Conrey said.

“TeacherFit is just one piece of the puzzle, in our view, not the be-all, end-all determining factor in deciding to hire teachers. We wouldn’t stand for a teacher basing a student’s semester grade solely on the result of one test, so why would we follow a different philosophy in our hiring practices?”

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Source:  The Chicago Sun-Times

The contentious budget talks that have dominated Washington for months intensified Wednesday, prompting President Obama to say he would accept a short-term hike in the debt ceiling if it gave lawmakers time to finalize a comprehensive deal.

Obama had pledged to veto any short-term measure, but White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president could accept an extension of “a few days” if it allowed a long-term deficit-reduction and debt-ceiling deal to work its way through Congress.

The White House concession added to a whirlwind week in which negotiations appeared to be changing daily. At first, leaders were focused on a fallback plan that would raise the debt ceiling but do little to control future borrowing. Then they started considering an ambitious, but complicated, bipartisan strategy for raising taxes and cutting cherished health and retirement programs.

By Wednesday evening, as House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) huddled with Obama at the White House, aides in both parties said a grand bargain to slice $4 trillion out of the federal budget over the next decade was back on the table.

All of those options remain in the mix. “There are multiple trains heading towards the station, and we have to decide,” Carney said before Obama met with the two GOP leaders. “We need to be sure that that fail-safe option is there — even as we pursue, aggressively, the possibility of doing something bigger.”

Republican leaders went on record 10 days ago against the Obama proposal, saying that as long as the deal included higher tax revenue, it could not pass the House. And they maintained that stance after Wednesday’s meeting.

In a brief interview after the White House meeting, Cantor said he remained committed to “not raising taxes” but did not deny that discussions included a larger plan. “Again, there are a lot of things that may or may not be possible, but we’re just trying to drive toward a result right now,” he said.

The mood has changed in the past two days after the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators unveiled a plan to shave at least $3.7 trillion off the deficit. Despite the fact that the plan included new tax revenue by closing loopholes, it received a relatively warm reception in some Republican quarters.

That has given Democrats hope that GOP resistance may be weaker than previously believed to a rewrite of the tax code that would raise significant new revenue — a key goal of negotiations between Obama and Boehner.

Still, the proposal came under fire Wednesday from some key Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who said it calls for a tax increase of at least $2 trillion over the next decade.

By Wednesday afternoon, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a leader of the Gang of Six effort, said his primary push now is for “an option at some point for the Senate and the House to vote on the plan we’ve put together — which is the only bipartisan plan that’s come from anywhere.”

As the negotiations moved closer to the Aug. 2 deadline, the key obstacle to a deal remained the vehement opposition among many House Republicans to the proposals, especially ones that include higher tax revenue.

Some Democrats and administration officials question whether the GOP leadership can effectively sell a compromise to a fractious caucus determined to cut spending at all costs, particularly the bloc of 87 freshman Republicans. Democrats say they are not sure if there is any way to satisfy the needs of that faction. “We want to accommodate their needs,” Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) said of the House leaders. “We just don’t understand what their needs are.”

In part, this is the same dilemma facing GOP leaders as they try to negotiate. They don’t know what will sell, and selling is the only option they have. Boehner is not an arm-twister — as he campaigned for the speaker’s chair last year he vowed that he would take a more gentle, consensus-driven approach. Rank-and-file lawmakers are surveyed, their opinions sought out, their temperature taken, and then decisions are made about how to maneuver.

“It’s not an issue of style as much as it is an issue of the American people just aren’t where we need them to be yet in order to move the Congress,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

“Part of this is just a slow education process of having people come to the realization of what it’s really going to take to balance the budget,” Nunes said. “I don’t think having a strong-arm style would have been any more helpful. It probably would have hurt early on.”

For the moment, Democrats are still waiting for an answer from House Republicans about the direction to take. “We have a plan to go forward over here, so I await word from the speaker,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Wednesday.

Later, after the meeting with Obama and Vice President Biden, Boehner huddled in the Capitol with a group of freshman lawmakers. GOP aides said it could be several more days before Boehner’s leadership team makes clear which path it intends to pursue.

Republicans are awaiting the outcome of the Senate’s debate on a bill that places caps on federal spending and then sends a constitutional amendment to the states mandating a balanced budget.

With Democrats in control of the Senate, that proposal’s defeat is likely to come by the weekend.

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Source:  The Washington Post

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration has refused to bar from city business a former top City Hall aide who admitted taking part in an illegal job-rigging scheme, the city’s top watchdog said in a report Tuesday.

Inspector General Joseph Ferguson takes issue with that decision. Ferguson also contends that the mayor’s office isn’t giving him the tools he needs to properly oversee city hiring, marking his first public criticism of the new administration.

“It is important that the new administration signal its intentions for ensuring the independence, integrity, and sustainability of this office,” Ferguson told the Tribune, adding that he understands Emanuel has only been in power for two months.

One key disagreement stems from the Department of Procurement Services to decline Ferguson’s recommendation about barring a onetime aide to former Mayor Richard Daley from getting city contracts.

Although Ferguson’s report does not identify the former official, the Tribune has learned he is John Kosiba.

In 2006, Kosiba testified — under grant of immunity from prosecution — that as the city’s sewer commissioner he helped get city jobs for political workers loyal to Daley. His testimony helped convict Robert Sorich, Daley’s former patronage chief, who is serving a four-year prison term.

The state Supreme Court in 2009 suspended Kosiba’s law license for three years based on his testimony at the Sorich trial.

Kosiba is now chief operating officer for SPAAN Tech Inc., a politically connected information and management technology firm that has four contracts with the city potentially worth several million dollars.

The Emanuel administration argues that Kosiba did not admit to a criminal offense, so the city does “not believe the city’s debarment regulations allow for debarment of his current employer,” said Jennifer Hoyle, Law Department spokeswoman.

Kosiba said he was unaware of the inspector general’s recommendation. “The testimony I gave at trial was truthful, and I’m happy the procurement department didn’t feel my conduct was such that it should bar me from doing business with the city,” Kosiba said.

Ferguson said he would “not preclude” an arrangement to end Kosiba’s involvement with city business that allows the company to keep its contracts.

Ferguson also states in his report that Emanuel’s administration is fighting in court his effort to prevent the Law Department from not complying with subpoenas related to the hiring oversight done by his office. “The issue is whether the inspector general can act independently,” he said.

Hoyle said the city is fighting to protect attorney-client privilege, not chip away at the inspector general’s subpoena powers.

The report also stated Ferguson needed three more employees to fully staff his division that makes sure the city complies with a federal prohibition on taking politics into consideration when making personnel decisions.

After its release, he received word that he would get two to three more employees, but Ferguson said he still seeks a meeting with officials to discuss a more “holistic” approach to his work that could save money.

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune