This photo of Union League club is courtesy of TripAdvisor
In remarks that corresponded with the rollout of her budget made at the Union League Club downtown, Cook County Board Toni Preckwinkle repeated controversial comments she made at another speech she made downtown, this one at the Fairmont Hotel, to commemorate her first hundred days. Like in the previous speech, Preckwinkle laid out a governing vision built on goal setting.
interior Fairmont Hotel
On Tuesday morning of April 19, 2011, Preckwinkle spoke at an event sponsored by the Executive’s Club at the Fairmont Hotel. In remarks to mark one hundred days in office, Preckwinkle said of the Cook County prison system, “Nobody talks about institutional racism, but what kind of a criminal justice system has an outcome where 70 percent of the people are African-American and the rest are Latinos.”
Of the healthcare debate, Preckwinkle said, “There was a devil’s bargain made in the passage of health care, and that devil’s bargain was the exclusion of the undocumented from coverage,”
At that event, Preckwinkle also laid out her vision for county government which was focused on goal setting, accountability, and standards, all concepts the County Government was sorely lacking when she came into office. She hit on five themes: fiscal responsibility, innovative leadership, transparency, accountability, and improved services.
Speaking this past week at the Union League Club, Preckwinkle touched on all the controversies, created some new ones, and expanded on all five themes of her government as well.
On the issue of racism in our criminal court system, Preckwinkle said she sat in on a bond court session one day. Preckwinkle said, “I sat in on one (bond court) one day, and one white kid faced the judge.”
Exterior of Cook County Jail
Preckwinkle continued to frame the issue of racism in the jail system through one statistic, 70% of those incarcerated in Cook County Jail are incarcerated for non-violent offenses. She offers solutions like I Bonds, work release, and other alternatives to incarceration. Preckwinkle routinely points out that most of those in the 70% are there awaiting trial, not serving their sentence. They simply been given no bond or a bond they can’t comply with.
Preckwinkle said she brought all the stakeholders at the county level in public safety together. She asked them what goals they had and, “not surprisingly the first goal was reducing our jail population. On any given day, we have about 8,500-9,000 inmates in our jails at a cost of $142 per day. We spend half a billion dollars-half a billion out of our $3.1 billion budget.”
On the issue of health care reform for illegal immigrants, Preckwinkle repeated her charge and repeated the euphemism, undocumented, “we made a bargain with the devil when passed health care, because we excluded the undocumented. In metropolitan areas like ours, there are many undocumented.”
Phot of John Stroger Hospital provided by Chicago Architecture Info, http://www.ChicagoArchitecture.info
Preckwinkle pointed out that at CCHHS between 50-60% of the patients are totally without insurance and the County has to pick up the tab for them.
Preckwinkle concluded, “I don’t know how the Congress in good conscience could pass health care reform without including the undocumented.”
The principle center piece of her plans to hold the county accountable, measurable, and constantly tracked is STAR: Set Achievement Achieve Results. It’s a new program which relied heavily on consultants to draft that brings the varying agencies in the County together and sets out goals and targets for each of them in a number of areas: fiscal responsibility, innovative leadership, transparency, improved services, and accountability.
Preckwinkle singled out property tax as an example saying, “For property tax people it was trying to get out the property taxes on time- which hasn’t been done in a decade. So that was their first goal,” continuing, “what are we going to do to get the tax bills out on time? So, there have been discussions around that. How are going to support each other? What kind of technology will be needed? Working backwards? What do we need to get done to get them out on time?”
Preckwinkle talked about the importance of goal setting in a larger sense as well, “health care, criminal justice, economic development, fiscal administration- people are doing the same things, what’s our goal, what’s our target, and how are we going to achieve it?”
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The solution? If we could just get more white people to commit more crimes, everything would even out.