IL Chicago-Bilandic — 2026-10-13 (video 1235411494)

Okay, good morning. The hour of 10 a.m. having come and gone, the House Executive Committee shall come to order. We have a number of members online, so Clerk, if you can please call the roll. Before I call the roll, do we want to use the replacement letter that we have for Representative Stevens?

Great. Thank you.

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Present.

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Present.

West is here.

Here.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee who are here both in person and virtually. and to our witnesses and everyone who has taken some time to be here for this subject matter hearing on House Bill 5282, which is the Municipal Home Rule Charter Act. I want to start by being very clear about what this bill does and what it does not do. This bill does not write a charter for the City of Chicago It does not decide how many older people Chicago should have It does not decide how power should be divided between the mayor and the city council It does not decide what our budget process should look like. It does not dictate ethics rules, public safety policy, labor policy, education policy, or tax policy. What this bill does is much more basic. It creates a lawful process by which the people of Chicago can have a serious conversation about how their city government should be organized and ultimately allows them to decide for themselves. And I believe that that conversation is long overdue. Madam Chair, my bias is going to show here a little bit, but I believe Chicago is the greatest city in the world. We are a city of neighborhoods, institutions, business, labor, universities, faith communities, cultural institutions, and people who care very deeply about this place. But among the 25 largest cities in America, Chicago stands alone in not having a municipal charter. New York has a charter. L.A. has a charter. Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio. Dallas has a charter. San Diego has a charter. Jacksonville, Fort Worth, San Jose, Austin, Charlotte, Columbus. Chicago is the outlier. And it isn't even an idea that's foreign to Illinois. 34 smaller Illinois municipalities still hold special charters dating back to the 19th century. Places like Cicero, Lake Forest, Mason City, Bloomington, and Cairo. For generations, our governing structure has developed through a combination of state statute, ordinance, court decisions, practice, tradition, and sometimes just the way that things have always been done. And every so often, something happens in Chicago that causes everybody to ask the same questions. Who actually had the authority to do that? Who was supposed to provide oversight? Why was the process designed this way? Why are some powers written down and others are just merely assumed or understood? And why is it so difficult for ordinary Chicagoans to understand where responsibility ends and where it begins? A city charter, in its simplest form, is a constitution for a city. It establishes the basic rules of the road, the structure of the government, the responsibilities of the institutions, the procedures for making major decisions, and the mechanisms for accountability. But I also want to say something very clearly. We're not here because we have a city charter sitting in our desk drawer. There is not a secret document somewhere in Springfield that decides what Chicago government should look like that would defeat the entire purpose of this legislation. Under HB 5282, 10 charter commissioners would be elected by Chicago voters in nonpartisan elections. Those 10 commissioners would select an 11th member to serve as their chair. Those commissioners would then have to establish the subjects they intend to study, identify their research and staffing needs, create a process for public participation, and hold regular public hearings governed by the Open Meetings and FOIA Act. And after all of their work, they would still not have the final word. The people would. Any proposed charter would go before Chicago voters at the November 2030 general election and would take effect only if a majority of voters approve it. So this process has elections on the front end, public participation in the middle and a referendum on the back end. That is intentional It won surprise any of you that I have opinions about Chicago government I sure everybody in this room does But this legislation is built around the idea that the structure of Chicago government should not belong to one mayor one city council one governor one general assembly one civic organization or one generation of political leadership It belongs to the people who live here. And I think one of the things that we have to resist today is the temptation to turn this hearing or this conversation into a debate about every possible provision somebody might one day put into a charter. That is not where we are. Today we are asking a threshold question. Should Chicagoans have a structured, transparent, democratic process to examine their form of government and decide whether they want to adopt a charter? The witnesses here today can help us understand the history, the constitutional framework, the experience of other cities, the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed process, and the decisions we need to think carefully about before this legislation moves. I will leave most of the technical questions and analysis to them, but I hope that the members today will listen with an open mind, because I do not view this as a criticism of Chicago. I view it as an expression of confidence in Chicago, Confidence that almost 3 million people are capable of having a sophisticated conversation about the government that serves them. Confidence that neighborhoods from one end of the city to the other deserve a voice in that conversation. And confidence that a city as important, as complicated, and as consequential as Chicago can take a serious look at the machinery of our democracy and ask whether it is still fit for the century ahead. With that, Madam Chair, I look forward to the testimony.

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Present.

leader Buckner again this is the first time we've had a hearing on this topic in the General Assembly okay so historic moment today absolutely thank you we'll start then with

Leader Stevens do we have permission to waive the reading

yes, you can waive that. If you change your mind, we'll go ahead and read through them, but for now, they're available online.

Good morning. Thank you, Chairman Williams and members of the committee. My name is Joel Hamernick. I'm the executive director of AmoreJust Chicago, and I've been a Woodlawn resident for more than 20 years. I spent the majority of my adult life working in and with community organizations and residents throughout the south and west side of the city. And as you know, Chicago's neighborhoods are full of people working to make this a better city. We believe that they should have a table, a seat at the table, when considering how our city is governed. I've seen the practical solutions that people bring to the table, and often how difficult it is engaging with government while working, building a business, leading an organization, raising a family. We hosting a series of dinners that will reach all 77 community areas and these dinner conversations are all about Chicago future and governance We created an alliance for a more just Chicago because when we got together and first asked ourselves the question what does everyone in Chicago agree about, we landed on one thing. We all love Chicago. Through these efforts, neighbors discuss what a safer, more diverse, equitable, and growing city would mean for people from every community and background. We all have a stake in the future of this great city. At these dinners, we explain what a charter is, why Chicago doesn't have one, what we could do when we reconsider one. And most importantly, we ask, if you could change something about the way that City Hall functions or the way that it relates to your communities, what would you do? And we gather these ideas. The writing of a charter establishes government's basic framework, its authorities, its responsibilities, and its decision-making process. and across the city, the universal reaction we get is astonishment that Chicago doesn't have one. We discuss how deliberative democracy can and should work, opportunities to learn together, weigh options and trade-offs, and help shape decisions and direction. People welcome that possibility. Too often, though, they feel it doesn't describe their current experience with city government. They respond to this with an acknowledgement that it should work this way. This process presents an opportunity in which it could work this way. People want public resources used well and services that work, of course, but they also want their community's experience included in this once-in-a-century opportunity to design the system. They value officials who listen and want participation built into the governance design available in every neighborhood and sustained across each administration. We recognize the charter cannot guarantee perfect outcomes, yet a charter commission would provide a public process to consider how to establish better outcomes for our city. At the Obama Presidential Center gathering that we hosted in June, we had leaders from 40 citywide organizations and representatives of 72 of the 77 community areas present and engaged, and we've got the other five now, too. We hear a shared desire for durable governing foundation, a Chicago that attracts the world to see what efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, inclusion, and accountability really looks like in a city government. It is time for Chicagoans to shape the governing system that meets the need of a modern city with modern tools. HB 5282 would open a charter commission process, with voters ultimately deciding whether to adopt the resulting charter. We expect disagreements in this process. In fact, we invite them. It's the quickest way to good ideas. Our alliance is committed to helping residents learn, deliberate, and contribute throughout the process and find ways to address concerns that we all share about the city. I urge you to advance this proposal and give Chicagoans the opportunity to help shape how their city is governed. Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Williams and members of the committee. My name is Joe Ferguson, President of the Civic Federation, a 132-year-old nonpartisan government research organization focused on promoting good governance and fiscal management. I'm here today to testify in support of HB 5282, also known as the Municipal Government. Home Rule Charter Act. A city charter, as has been mentioned by the prior speakers, is a constitution for a municipal government, a city. It defines how a city's government is structured, which officials are elected or appointed, and what powers they wield, and how they relate and work in interaction with each other. It sets the rules of the game for policy and decision-making in the city. And Chicago is the only major city in the United States without one. And I want to reiterate that point. I'm not saying that Chicago's city constitution is flawed or dysfunctional in some way. I'm saying it doesn't exist. This is not new. In 1954, a Chicago Home Rule Commission constituted of elected officials noted then that Chicago's lack of a municipal charter was an anachronism in the United States. That anachronism has not aged well over the last 72 years. What does it mean for Chicago to have no charter? It means that there is no coherent and forcible structure to the way government works here. Inadequate transparency, factionalist politics, and almost constant fiscal crises are just some of the issues that haunt Chicago. These issues are not unconnected. They are all symptoms of the same disease. Chicago's government is not structured to be accountable to voters. We leave to members of our city council the power to draw their own wards and then manage them, but don't equip them to succeed as legislators governing an entire city. We have essentially zero structural checks and balances on the decisions made by the mayor, who for much of the city's modern history has functioned as the equivalent of both the president or governor and the Speaker of the House. We can tinker with these problems at the margin, providing a little more authority to the City Council here, advocating for a better budget process there, but we won't fix the root cause of Chicago's governance problems unless we undertake a fundamental re-evaluation of the City's governance structures. Establishing a City Charter is the best way to accomplish that. Ultimately, the decision about what to change about Chicago's government will lie with a charter commission with the input of the voters. But I want to provide a few possible examples of what might come of a charter commission so that you understand the potential that a city charter has to better the way that Chicago's government makes decisions and runs. A charter put together and examined by a commission, which this legislation seeks to authorize, might include changing which citywide offices are elected in order to create independent checks and balances on the mayor, such as an elected comptroller or corporation council, providing funding for a quasi-independent professional office of financial analysis for the city council. At the state level, as you all know, the governor has a budget office, but the state legislature you all ably serve has its own commission that provides independent financial analysis. I am sure that many of you find COGFA to be essential during the budget season. The Chicago City Council technically has a wisp of a financial office as well but not with the requisite resources and independence to do the job for a city with a billion budget over 32 employees thousands of contractors a fragile credit rating and crushing long legacy debt and pension obligation That wisp of an office has enough funding for only five staff members and produces just a few reports each year. This means that Chicago City Council's hands are tied behind its back during each budget season. A charter might also, and these are mights, this is for the commission with the inputs of the people to decide, might require additional oversight for long-term concessions. New York City has a commission built into its charter of elected leaders that must review and approve any long-term asset sales. If Chicago had had such a commission in 2009, it might have pumped the brakes on the infamous parking meter deal. But our complete lack of checks and balances led to that deal being waved through by an under-informed council with no capacity, legal right to the information and analytical capabilities needed to vet, score, and understand that deal. And the city is still paying for it and will for decades. There are many more changes that a commission could make, but in order to be transparent and legitimate, those decisions should be up to the people of Chicago. That is why this legislation calls for the election of a commission that will be charged with drafting a city charter, followed by a ballot referendum, as required by the Illinois state constitution, to allow voters the option to approve or reject the charter commission's draft. Under this bill, decisions on how Chicago's government works will rest exactly where they should, with the people of Chicago. There are two things that most people do not like. The way things are and change. At the city, region, and state level, we all know that the way things are, particularly in the city, is no longer sustainable. So we have no choice but to change. A charter itself will directly change nothing at the policy level, but it will change everything by providing structures, principles and processes to guide how it is that we go about making the changes that we all know are needed in a way that is transparent, accountable, inclusive of the people and enforceable. This city's government has been dysfunctional for far too long. A charter will not fix every problem that Chicago is facing. But it will give us the tools that we need to start fixing those problems, tools that today we do not even have. I urge you to support this bill and stand ready to answer your questions. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Kimberly Nelson. I'm the Coates Distinguished Professor of Public Administration and Government and the Director of the Division of Public Leadership and Governance at the University of North Carolina School of Government. My research and professional work focus on local government management, local government corruption government structure and government performance I regularly advise local governments and charter commissions around the country on questions of organizational design and I've served on the steering committee for the latest revision of the National Civic League's Model City Charter. I'm here today to discuss the importance of modern, clear, and accessible municipal charters. A municipal charter is a city's foundational governing document. It It establishes how authority is distributed, how decisions are made, and how residents and government officials interact with one another. As communities grow and change, governing structure can become increasingly complex and difficult for residents to understand. A well-designed charter provides greater clarity about how local government operates and who is responsible for key decisions. Operating under a locally developed municipal charter, rather than relying primarily on state statutes as its governing framework, would provide several important benefits for the city of Chicago. First, a clear and current charter promotes transparency and public engagement. Residents should be able to understand how their government works, who is responsible for key decisions, and where to direct questions or concerns. When governing provisions are difficult to locate, understand, or navigate, they can create barriers to meaningful civic participation. A charter then helps residents engage more effectively with their local government and better understand government operations. Second, a municipal charter can reduce the administrative burden on both residents and local government staff. Ambiguous provisions can create confusion about duties, reporting relationships, and decision-making authority. A clear governing document improves efficiency by reducing uncertainty and making government structures easier to understand and administer. While Chicago doesn't currently operate under municipal charter, experiences from cities across the country illustrate the value of creating a single comprehensive governing document. Municipal governing structures that develop over time through statutes, ordinances, and incremental changes can become difficult for residents and officials to navigate. The opportunity to develop a comprehensive charter allows the community to create a coherent document that reflects how the government operates today and clearly communicates its structure and processes to the public. Third, a municipal charter can enhance accountability. Effective governance depends on residents being able to identify who is responsible for the decisions and outcomes of their government. A charter can clearly define the roles and responsibilities of elected officials, appointed officials, and professional managers. This clarity strengthens oversight, supports ethical governance, and helps maintain public trust. Finally, adopting a municipal charter allows communities to design governing structures that reflect contemporary expectations for transparency, accountability, and effective service delivery. Local governments today face increasing complexity in financial management, economic development, public engagement, technology, and intergovernmental collaboration. A charter provides a framework that can clearly define responsibilities and support effective governance as communities confront these challenges. Importantly, adopting a charter is not about advancing a particular political agenda or favoring one governing structure over another. It is about ensuring that the structure a community chooses is clearly defined, transparent, understandable to residents, and capable of supporting effective governance. The legislation under consideration recognizes the value of giving Chicago residents the opportunity to develop and adopt a municipal charter tailored to the city unique governance needs Based on my research and experience working with local governments across the country I believe communities are best served when residents have access to governing documents that are transparent, coherent, and easy to understand. For those reasons, I encourage your consideration of this legislation and appreciate your attention to the important role a municipal charter can play in strengthening local governance in Chicago. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Thank you, Chairwoman Williams, members of the Executive Committee. My name is Michael Ward. I'm the Director of the Collins Center for Public Management, which is a public service unit at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Our center provides technical assistance on governance and management issues to municipalities in Massachusetts and across New England. I spent a great deal of my time at the Centre managing our charter team and working directly on charter projects for a wide range of Massachusetts municipalities. Before I talk about the benefits of having a charter, I do want to briefly address why I believe it's good for the residents of Chicago to have a chance to decide whether they want to review their form of government. I'll give you two reasons, one philosophical and one practical. On the philosophical side, as I sometimes suggest to communities considering a charter, Thomas Jefferson argued it should be a fundamental principle of governing that no generation should be able to define the government for future generations, and that each generation should be able to choose its own laws and form of government. The current generation of Chicago residents may in fact decide they're content with the broad form and structure of their local government, but giving them the choice in and of itself is an important principle of local self-governance. On the practical side, there's real value in going through a charter process regardless of what the final form looks like. A well-designed and well-facilitated charter process is a big-picture systemic look at what is working and what could improve the long-term functioning of the city. It's a chance for a group to step outside the day-to-day issues and fights to set a broad vision for the city and to think about whether or not changes are needed to the fundamental structure to achieve that vision. Beyond that, a well-run charter process actually becomes a public education process. The public learns more about its local government and new people and new groups often take an interest. There's great value in the civic engagement gains that can come from the process itself. It can also be educational for city officials themselves. Issues will likely be surfaced in a way that leads the city to consider changes outside of the charter process. I'll give you an example from a small city I worked closely with a few years ago. Some officials knew there were frustrations with how the city communicated with residents. But the charter process revealed this was not a small frustration, but a core challenge that affected operations and services in a wide variety of ways. That led the city to develop and implement its first 311 system completely outside of the charter process. Without the charter review, it is unlikely city officials would have understood the problem in the way they came to understand it and would not have become the priority that it did. So in short, the charter process itself can lead to positive changes that actually have nothing to do with the charter itself. So those are some of the things that I see as the value of a charter process. Now I'd like to talk about what I see as the value of the charter itself. And there are many reasons I think it's valuable, but I'd like to focus on three. Clarity, consistency, and change. The first reason is clarity, and Professor Nelson spoke eloquently on this just a few moments ago, but I'll just add to it that a charter can and should provide a single, clear solution. source of truth that public officials, residents, and others can access and understand. I see too many municipalities here in New England whose structure and key processes are hard to find and hard to understand. The lack of clarity leads to disputes, it reinforces inequality, and it reduces trust in government. The foundational governing document of an organization should be easy to find and easy to understand. The second reason is consistency. As a municipal constitution, the charter should set out in broad strokes how the various pieces operate so that people can make long-term plans based on an understanding that the basics will be stable. The charter should not get too deep into specifics, but it should provide the foundational ground rules. It should be amendable, but not too easily. This consistency makes the charter a stabilizing factor in local government operations and for the community. The last reason I want to mention is change. And what I mean by this is that even as a modern charter provides consistency, it also provides mechanisms for the municipality to adapt to the ever-accelerating changes that we see in the world around us. And there are a bunch of ways, but I just want to name two. First, and most directly, modern charters nearly always include their own built-in periodic review mechanisms, often 10 years. A built-in review creates a maximum amount of time that can go by without the charter being reviewed and creates a clear and consistent process for that review. With this in place, a city won't go a century before having a discussion like the one that you are having now. Second, many charters include citizen participation mechanisms like referendum, initiative petition, and recall. And these provide additional ways that the city can adapt to a changing world. So there are more I could get into, but those are the three I really wanted to draw focus to, clarity, consistency, and change. And I'd like to conclude by raising a very common question that I've seen opponents of charter processes ask in the work that we do. Why do we need to do this now? Or put another way, if it isn't broken, why try to fix it? And this is a very important question. The world is so busy right now. There are so many issues and challenges that we all could be focusing on. Why do this now? And my answer to that is you fix the roof while the sun is shining. It's precisely because things don't seem so bad that now is the time to do this. If you wait until something breaks, if you wait until a storm arrives, then not only will you be forced to make changes while dealing with the immediate problems, but the changes you make will be driven by and focused on the immediate problems, rather than the more systemic and forward-looking approach that you can take now. So if the sun is shining, or even if it's a little gray, then I would suggest that this is the ideal time for the city to begin a process like the one you are contemplating today. Thank you for your time, and I'm happy to answer any questions at the end.

Hi, good morning, Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Carla Fuentes, and I served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles City Charter Reform Commission. And I'm joining you today not to tell Chicago what would ultimately be in its charter, but to share a few lessons from having recently gone through a major charter reform process in another large American city. One of the biggest lessons I took from that experience is that a city charter is, in many ways, a city's values translated into the rules of government. It determines who has power how that power is checked how decisions are made and how residents can participate In Los Angeles we described our city charter as our city basic rulebook one that will outlast any individual mayor council member or commissioner So before a commission debates individual provisions, I think it should be clear about two things. What values should guide this work and how will the public meaningfully participate in answering that question. In Los Angeles, public engagement ultimately became a significant part of our process. We held 52 public meetings, town halls across all 15 of our council districts, supported grassroots outreach, heard expert testimony, partnered on civic assemblies, and received thousands of pages of written public comment. But the most important measure of public engagement is not simply how many meetings you hold, it is whether that participation can actually shape the work. Throughout our process, residents and community organizations raised issues, perspectives, and priorities that were not necessarily at the center of our conversation when we began. As commissioners, we had to be willing to listen, revisit our assumptions, and allow that input to inform what we ultimately considered and recommended. That experience reinforced for me that public engagement has to be capable of shaping the agenda, not simply responding to it. And if residents can only comment after the scope and solutions have already been decided, that is a much more limited form of participation. I therefore think that Chicago's approach should get something important very right, establishing an initial scope so the commission has direction while still allowing commissioners to take up additional structural topics through a public vote as the process develops. The second lesson is commission independence. Commissioners need resources, but they also need meaningful authority over the people and institutions advising them. In Los Angeles, questions arose about staffing, legal counsel, and whether a commission could independently obtain legal advice, including while we were considering reforms involving the city attorney's office itself. If the commission is being asked to evaluate the structure of an existing government, it should not be wholly dependent on those same institutions to tell it what it can and cannot do. That is why I would strongly encourage you all to preserve the provisions allowing Chicago's commission to hire its own staff and council. I would also encourage the commission to adopt transparency safeguards early, including clear rules around ex parte communications. Commissioners will naturally and should hear from elected officials, departments, advocates, labor, community organizations, and many others. That question is whether the public can see who is influencing the process. Third, commissioners need a clear understanding of what belongs in the charter and what does not. A charter cannot solve every policy problem, of course, facing a city. In Los Angeles, some of the most complicated conversations involved civil service, personnel, and other areas where structural reform intersects with departments, existing laws, as well as labor agreements. Our own final report ultimately recommended that future civil service reform be undertaken in partnership with the city's labor organizations. My lesson from that was simple. Bring the people who understand and will be affected by a system to the table early and distinguish between foundational governance and policymaking. Chicago proposal makes that distinction by allowing the commission to address governmental structure powers budgeting elections ethics and oversight while excluding substantive policy outcomes And lastly, I would just encourage you to pay very close attention to what happens after the commission finishes its work. Some of our recommendations survived that process relatively intact. We recommended a formal capital improvement plan and a two-year budget cycle so Los Angeles could plan beyond one fiscal year at a time. Both concepts are now included in Measure LA before our voters this November. But we also saw the limitations of not having a direct path to our voters. Our commission was created in the wake of a major crisis of public trust. And we recommended significant ethics and accountability reforms, including stronger independent oversight and independent legal counsel. Yet we could not submit our own recommendations directly to voters. They first went through our city council. By the time the ethics package reached the ballot as Measure EE, it contained some of that accountability work. but it also had been combined with provisions that included reducing the charter requirement for council meetings from three weeks per day to just one week per day, and increasing the signature threshold for a citizen referendum. And I mentioned that not to debate those provisions today, but because it taught me an important lesson about process design. Decide who controls the final product before anyone knows which recommendations they will agree or disagree with. That is another feature of the Chicago proposal that I would strongly protect. The commission would draft the charter, approve the ballot language, and submit its work directly to voters at a general election. Chicago will ultimately create a process that fits Chicago. But from my experience in Los Angeles, I would encourage you all to protect four things from the outset, those being meaningful public participation, commission independence, a clear but adaptable scope, and of course, a direct and transparent path to the voters. If those pieces are designed well, the process itself can begin building that public trust that a charter is ultimately supposed to protect. Thank you all, and happy to answer any questions as well.

Thank you for all of your testimony. This is a fascinating topic, and I look forward to really delving into things. But there's been a lot of discussion today about other cities having a charter and Chicago not having one. And yet my understanding is that a lot of the elements that appear in a city charter already exist in city ordinance or state law. And so I'm wondering, you know, what specifically is missing in Chicago that that other cities have? and what is the benefit of going through what seems like a creation of many more layers of bureaucracy to create something that already exists. I MEAN I HEARD THE COMMENT THAT THIS WILL ADDRESS FACTIONAL POLITICS AND STREAMLINE THE BUDGET PROCESS BUT THE CITY factional politics and streamline the budget process but the City Council Budget Office was created by ordinance and so you know couldn't we just beef that up by amending the ordinance so you know just some some thoughts on you You know, why would we go through this elaborate process to create something that already exists and can be amended, you know, either at the state or through city ordinance? Thank you.

We also have Leader Hammond seeking recognition.

Yeah, there's the opportunity for many kind of robust public processes here, Leader Hammond, including obviously the voting on the commission. All the commission's work is public, and they have to talk about, define the scope of what they are looking to do and what is in their wheelhouse. Then there is public process post that, and then there's a referendum at the end of the day that decides how things move forward. So there are a number of junctures for very robust and aggressive public participation here.

Mr. Ferguson?

So that was my final question, Mr. Ferguson, on what would be required if there needed to be tweaks or changes to what was originally put in place. And maybe for many of the witnesses, having witnessed the need to go through that process, does it become onerous or is it fairly smooth?

I can speak to that. Great. I've worked with Portland and Dallas and San Jose recently. Yes, so Portland's would probably be most analogous to what Chicago is trying to do because Portland completely reformulated their government and their very big city. And they did, after the referendum was passed, they did have to have a committee convened to help figure out and sort of tweak the system that was passed. And so there were quite a few changes, actually, that came about as they were re-referenced. actually trying to make the new form of government work. And so I don't think it's uncommon to see some of that work after the referendum. So the referendum, the charter goes into place, but you still have to make the form of government work in practice. And especially if it's a brand new form of government, not something that's modeled after the model city charter. As Portland's was, Portland's is a hybrid type of government. They had to definitely do a lot of work post-referendum. Thank you for that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for that, Madam Chair. I think the simplest answer here is that city government in this town needs a blueprint and a roadmap. I think both Joel and Joe both laid out some very important things, reasons on why this makes sense. But literally, I was having a conversation with my godson the other day explaining to him from a civics perspective the separation of powers and government. All right. Joe brought this up a couple of times. There is no there are not other many other workable, functional governments in the world where the head of the executive branch also is the presiding officer of the legislative branch. if for no other reason that the things that we learned as young people in civics don't exist in the building across the street by no fault of anyone who's there right now just because of custom you know that is a a huge problem when you talk to folks around this city who want to know who's in charge where the rule making authority comes from we cannot answer that question clearly and so when you think about the fact that clarity is kindness we don't have a clear government right now. And so whether you live in Logan Square or Edgewater or Roseland or Bronzeville, you want to know who's working for you. You want to know what they have the authority and the capabilities to do. This, once again, streamlines all of those things, puts them in one place. But more importantly, this isn't people in Springfield or City Hall or in this room deciding what the future looks like for people in Chicago. It's giving the people of Chicago an opportunity to have some say-so about what the future of government and democracy looks like in their city. And to me, there is no better reason to do this other than streamlining processes and cutting back on waste and all of those things, but to give the people a true voice in the future of their city.

Very briefly in addition we all know the stories of things that haven gone well and decisions that have been made in Chicago And I think for the average person understanding a charter as simply guardrails and lane dividers on the highway we have to all travel on together with some basic rules of the road that allow for reasonable expectations and understanding of everybody, of how it is that we're going to go about this process. But at this particular moment, whether it's budget accounting standards, whether it's a requirement of a supermajority for purposes of major debt issuance approvals, whether it is a requirement of a referendum for the sell-off or the leasing of a major asset that belongs to the people, these things are guardrails. And so if the baseline for government, and this shouldn't be the baseline, the aspiration should be higher, is do no harm, a charter would do a much better job of assuring that further harm is not done than the system that we have now.

hypothetically. We've been trying to do that for a long time in America, and we have good periods and we have bad periods. This is probably more a second generation on the subject of Representative Hammond's question, so what happens going forward, whether or not it's a requirement that every five or 10 years there be an amendment commission that's charged, or whether it's a referendum process for smaller changes. New York City does not have a municipal election without there being some referendum that modifies the charter in some very modest way responsive to a specific challenge or constituency desire. So there's big forums and there's lesser forums. But here's what we know in Chicago in particular, and this is about Chicago and And the hope would be that we figure this out for Chicago in a way that actually may have broader application. But this is no longer a city that will have 20-year mayors. This is a city that will have good mayors, better mayors, and not so good mayors. And this is a city where increasingly, as in America, there will be pretty significant swings in the objectives and the orientations of one administration to another, one council to another. And what that really requires is some form of constancy foundation and stability as to how it is that those widely disparate views that will swing over time actually all have to do the core business which is actually the competent operation and probity of running a very very complex polity I thank you Can I just add something real quick to that Madam Chair I think the way we intend for the process to work I would actually say that it is utilizing the electoral process because the people have say-so at a bunch of different junctures here. But the traditional electoral process, right, we campaign, people vote for us, and we go from there. those processes are important, but that determines who governs. What we're trying to do is determine how they govern.

Yes, I just want to point out that research has solidly determined over many years that structuring institutions and local governance affect performance, In particular, carefully structuring your local government can reduce corruption risk and other performance miscues that we've heard about today. And so I just want to point out that carefully structuring government, particularly making it more professional, will drastically reduce your risk of corruption and low performance.

Yes, thank you. the charter itself are the chance to take the longer term, the systemic issue, and it sort of extracts them from the day-to-day short-term political and policy debates that are always going on in the city. Great. Thank you. I think the other point that just to wrap up my thoughts

What we have found as we're out talking to people around the city is that there's frankly a hunger to be involved in substantive conversations about the future of the city. There's a great deal of concern that people have. Those who read the op-eds and follow where we are in pensions and debt are really afraid for the future of the city. Those who live in neighborhoods that have significant development happening nearby but don know how it going to impact them like near the Quantum Park or Project 1901 I think it called on the west side And so having a mechanism to draw people into to step in is something first of all that people are, are, um, uh, extremely interested in, in being involved in understanding how it is that they can be at the table. And what we have found by talking to people who've gone through this process in New York and LA and other places, that the most important thing that we could do in this process is create a way now for people to be involved in the conversation and people from every part of the city, which is why our outreach is both, it's not just geographic, but it's, you know, class and culture and everything else. And creating a mechanism to draw people in to understand how it is they can participate and be a part of forming this kind of a foundational element of the government. We have found that people, honestly, in Chicago, we have a well-worn a well-earned sense of cynicism and even apathy, and it shows up in our current levels of civic engagement. When this topic is put on the table, it is wild to watch people respond to it, to have an opportunity. And one other point that I'd make that just dovetails with what we heard from the experts from out of town, and that is that this process also just generates good ideas, period. Many of these are good ideas that don't belong in a charter, but that's okay. If we're going through this public engagement process to engage people around their ideas, inevitably we find a neighborhood on the far north side that solved some specific problem in their local park that somebody on the south side has just been banging their head against the wall, not trying to figure out. We can cross-pollinate those ideas. So we're seeing, just what these other experts mentioned, some good ideas are really relevant to the idea of charter, accountability, transparency, after the fact evaluation of the impact of policy, not to, not necessarily to like get somebody in trouble for writing bad policy, simply to learn, did it work? Did it not work? How well did it work? These kinds of structures built into the conversation and then ultimately into our governing foundation are things that are, there's just a strong deal of interest across the city.

You can't be an effective advocate without access to the information. You can't get access to the information without knowing where the information is. You can't speak to the right person without knowing how your government is actually working and who is the decision maker and through what processes. A charter provides for the capacity and the ability to elevate all of that to the benefit of the people to be more effective and engage citizens directly with their elected officials so that their elected officials actually in accountability and transparency are critical values to charters everywhere so that the outcomes have greater transparency, are comprehensible, and therefore are legitimate. And that's what this does is it elevates citizen capacity.

Yes, Madam Chair, once again, thank you for this opportunity. I know you and I have had a number of conversations about this, about the importance of it, and I'm very excited that more and more of our colleagues are beginning to think about what this means for the future of Chicago. just about righting the wrongs of the past. In many ways, this is about the growth and development of a city that has a future ahead of it. Chicago has always found a way to do big things. We built this city on swampland, and when the ground wouldn't cooperate, we decided to raise the streets. And when the river got our people sick, we decided to reverse the flow of it. And 155 years ago this week, in fact, we watched the city burn to the ground. On October 10th of 1871, when the flames went out with more than 17,000 buildings destroyed and 100,000 people left homeless, just three days later, actually today, October 13th, the leaders of this city were already organizing its recovery. Mayor Roswell Mason formally placed the Chicago Relief and Aid Society in charge of recovery on October 13th of 1871. So think about that. The ashes were still warm and Chicago was planning its recovery. It's come back and it's rebuilding, which is huge. Instead of packing up and moving somewhere else, we had the audacity, the arrogance, the mitigated nerve to build this city all over again and to build it better. And so we don just accept the world as we find it in this city We try to find a way to change it right And so for folks that are struggling with this I know this is a hard concept because it different and it's new, but I truly believe that Chicago can figure out a way to do this. Burnham told us not to make any small plans, but without a charter, we don't have the ability to make plans at all. And so if we believe in this city and we trust in the future of it, I believe that this is an opportunity for us to put people at the center and people at the forefront of how we move Chicago along. And so thank you for the opportunity and the attention to this. And I look forward to more robust conversations and hopefully getting some movement.

Thank you. Thank you.