Chicago mayors and their inspector generals: A contentious relationship that almost always ends badly
When Deborah Witzburg announced that she would not seek a second-term as Chicago’s inspector general, it was a bit like telling Mayor Brandon Johnson, "You can’t fire me. I quit."
Johnson has been loggerheads with the watchdog he inherited over a wide range of ethics issues. There was virtually no chance that the mayor would reappoint Witzburg, who fought for a two-term limit with every intention of serving the full eight years.
"I have not had a conversation with the mayor about it,” Witzburg told the Sun-Times, calling the eight-year term “a limit — not a requirement.”
“This is not a game of chess. I’m sincere in saying that, with the passage” of the latest in string of ethics reforms, “I am very confident in a way I wasn’t before that I can leave this place better than I found it. I will have done what I came here to do.”
Ald. Matt Martin (47th), chair of the City Council’s Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight, said Witzburg has "done perfect work" and he "was hoping that she would seek a second term. In fact, I assumed that she would be."
That’s the way it goes in Chicago. No matter who the mayor is or who the inspector general is, it always seems to get turbulent and sometimes end badly.
Four mayors have had inspectors general: Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson.
Four different styles. Same result. The political equivalent of a separation, or a messy divorce.
“It’s tough when you have someone laying it all out there—the good, the bad and the ugly. And we’ve had plenty of bad and ugly to talk about in recent years and decades,” Martin said. “That’s gonna be challenging, especially when any executive is gonna want to paint things in ways that look as rosy as possible. But, it’s never been more important to have someone who is strong and principled and independent.”
It was Daley, a former Cook County state’s attorney, who campaigned on a promise to create the Office of Inspector General to replace the Office of Municipal Investigations under his predecessor Jane Byrne.
Chicago’s first inspector general
Daley filled the job with Alexander Vroustouris, a former assistant prosecutor, and gave him subpoena power to investigate city employees. City Council members and their employees were off-limits.
Vroustouris was a loyal soldier who lasted 16 years, primarily by concentrating on lower-level corruption even as minority business fraud, contract cronyism and rigged hiring was rampant in the Daley administration.
The only time Vroustouris seemed to go rogue in a way that embarassed Daley was when he uncovered a rampant ghost payrolling scandal in the Streets and Sanitation office in the 1st Ward, then notoriously controlled by organized crime.
The 37 accused employees averaged just two hours a day sweeping Loop streets. They allegedly spent the rest of their work time going to the racetrack, moonlighting or, in one case, committing a $250,000 jewelry robbery in Fond du Lac, Wis.
When the Sun-Times blew the lid off the Hired Truck and city hiring scandals, Vroustouris resigned amid allegations that he had not done enough to investigate serious corruption.
‘It created press-control problems’
With federal investigators crawling all over City Hall, Daley had no choice but to get serious to try and inoculate himself from the burgeoning headlines.
He chose former federal prosecutor David Hoffman as inspector general.
Hoffman said he made the terms and conditions crystal clear during his job interview with Daley. He was “only taking the job to conduct that office in as independent and strong a way as possible because there were clearly problems that needed to be investigated.”
“Once we started making cases and uncovering things and working with the feds, we would hear from people right around him that they were upset and surprised,” Hoffman told the Sun-Times. “My reaction was, `What did you expect? This is what an inspector general does. This is the only way to properly run the office.’ I had made that clear.”
In retrospect, Hoffman said it’s obvious why he ran into almost immediate trouble with Daley.
“It was new and different that this portion of city government would be like just super-independent. It created press-control problems, messaging control problems for them,” he said.
Hoffman’s investigations were frequently undermined by Daley.
He embarrassed and infuriated Chicago’s longest-serving mayor — most notably by alleging that Daley left nearly $1 billion on the table when he privatized Chicago parking meters.
Hoffman recalled that Daley was so incensed by the IG's study of the deal that helped avert a property tax increase, he ordered then-Budget Director Paul Volpe to “race over and hold a press conference 30 minutes later in the same location” to dispute Hoffman's analysis.
“There was definitely a way to do some deal that was much more protective of the city,” said Hoffman, whose analysis was prophetic and ultimately proven right.
Like Witzburg, Hoffman did not seek the second term he had no chance of getting. Instead, he ran and lost a race for the U.S. Senate.
Legal fight over access to documents
Enter Joe Ferguson, who was chosen to replace Hoffman based, in part, on the strong recommendation of his friend Lori Lightfoot, who worked together with Ferguson in the U.S. attorney’s office.
When Daley retired and Emanuel replaced him, the relationship between mayor and watchdog went south yet again, this time because of investigations, audits and aggressive suggestions to cut spending and raise revenue.
At one point, Ferguson warned that Chicago faced a “risk of increased waste, fraud and misconduct” by city employees and contractors because Emanuel had refused to give the inspector general unrestricted access to city documents and the power to enforce his own subpoenas.
Their legal battle over access to documents went all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court.
Forrest Claypool ran the Chicago Park District, the CTA and the Chicago Public Schools for Daley after serving as chief of staff.
He views Ferguson as a “model IG” because he was “one of the rare ones who didn’t use it to benefit himself.” But, even Ferguson went too far, Claypool said.
“He was doing studies on garbage pick-up and how many grids there should be. Basic things that are both operational and political and that’s the job of the elected mayor — not an independent IG,” Claypool said. “You can see where that might get a little bit irritating to someone like Rahm, who seemed to tolerate the other…investigations and recommendations much better than historically we’ve seen with mayors.”
The relationship got so frosty, it appeared Emanuel was counting the days until Ferguson's term expired.
It was only after the Ohio bribery scandal culminated in the conviction of former City Comptroller Amer Ahmad did Emanuel seem to realize that Ferguson was more helpful than threatening.
After that, Ferguson was re-appointed twice, with his powers and budget expanding exponentially.
Lightfoot’s clashes with Ferguson
When the corruption scandal that culminated in the conviction of former Ald. Edward Burke (14th) vaulted Lightfoot into the mayor’s office, her close relationship with Ferguson initially raised questions about just how independent Ferguson would be in a Lightfoot administration.
But it wasn’t long before Ferguson’s aggressive investigations alienated Lightfoot. Their former friendship was soon replaced by a cold war that, at times, turned hostile.
Lightfoot clashed openly and repeatedly with Ferguson and ultimately forced him out. She then declared her desire to find a new inspector general who “understands the importance of staying in their lane.”
That raised legitimate questions about whether Lightfoot would be willing to appoint Witzburg, Ferguson’s hand-picked deputy inspector general for public safety, as Ferguson’s replacement.
Witzburg had worked together with Ferguson to produce reports highly critical of the Lightfoot administration in general and the Chicago Police Department in particular. The IG eviscerated CPD for its unpreparedness for the civil unrest that devolved into two rounds of rampant looting that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
After a protracted nine-month search, Lightfoot ultimately did choose Witzburg. But Ferguson accused his former boss of being dragged kicking and screaming into what turned out to be a failed attempt to shore up the progressive base that put her in office.
“The months of delay were unforgivable. Deborah’s name was provided to the mayor in December” of 2021, Ferguson said at the time. “We had to wait months because the [search] committee was asked to go back to the well and do another search, which signaled maybe she didn't want to appoint Deborah.”
Johnson’s search for the next inspector general
Tensions between Witzburg and Johnson have ranged from her charge that he accepted valuable gifts and blocked access to those items to her claim that he and Lightfoot impeded her internal investigations.
The latest in a seemingly endless string of ethics reforms was tailor-made to remove those roadblocks.
Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry accepted an ordinance she adamantly opposed and condemned as illegal just five months ago only after Martin agreed to a series of concessions.
By next spring, Johnson must find, yet another inspector general. Witzburg can only hope there’s a happier ending.
“This is a challenging relationship between the person in this job and the person on the fifth floor of City Hall. It need not be a hostile one,” she said. “I have seen what it is like to try to do this work when there’s gasoline all over the floor.”