When the City Council rubber-stamped Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 75-year, $1.15 billion plan to privatize Chicago parking meters, then-Ald. George Cardenas (12th) abstained because he “didn’t have the numbers” to make an informed decision.
Chicago voters won’t be saying the same about the long-shot campaign for mayor of Chicago that Cardenas launched on Tuesday.
The former alderman-turned-commissioner of the Cook County Board of Review is flooding the zone with position papers aimed at convincing voters that he has the ideas, experience and guts to confront Chicago’s $1 billion budget shortfall and $36 billion pension crisis.
One week after outgoing Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza became the first Latino candidate to formally enter the race, Cardenas became the second — even as he seeks to retain his seat on the Cook County Board of Review.
Cardenas acknowledged that he is a long shot and that he needs to raise “a couple of million dollars” to stand out in a field of roughly a dozen candidates seeking to deny Brandon Johnson a second term.
“I’m starting from the parking lot. But it’s always been like that in my entire life. So I’m not afraid of that… I’ve always been the underdog,” said Cardenas, 61.
“You’ve got a guy who has 20 years of experience in the City Council, who was an accountant, an auditor, a management consultant… When I had to help corporations save money, I did that… In a crisis like this, that’s the guy who’s been there all along. That’s my path to victory… I’m gonna go to funders and say, `You’ve got the right guy… who is going to execute this plan and bring the city back.”
Cardenas hopes to rise above the pack with a pile of proposals that he hopes will showcase his 20-years of experience in the City Council.
They include: Capping runaway city spending at the rate of inflation; freezing exempt hiring while conducting a “citywide position” audit; consolidating health insurance contracts, rebidding benefits and exploring the possibility of self-insurance and increasing city employee pension contributions while identifying “permanent replacement revenue” for those four city funds.
Although he served as City Council floor leader under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cardenas accused Lightfoot of using the avalanche of pandemic relief funds to increase city spending by 54% while inflation grew by just 27%.
“If the wage growth keeps at this trend line, we will never keep up with the payments into the pension system,” Cardenas said. “The contribution levels will have to increase. My analysis will prove that and say, `This is how we can do that.’ That’s one way of being honest with the taxpayer and honest with the staff. That’s reality.”
Although he barely gathered enough signatures to survive a petition challenge for the office he now holds, Cardenas believes he has the unique mix of experience necessary to tackle Chicago’s vexing problems.
A self-described “procurement expert,” he’s promising to hire 500 more Chicago police officers, in part by freezing professional service contracts over $500,000, “triaging contracts above $1 million using a “red/yellow/green alert system and terminating all red contracts, and by releasing what he calls a “public vendor consolidation and performance scorecard.”
He estimated that $245 million in savings could be generated by consolidating health care contracts and rebidding benefits.
“Tell me why the 50 ward yards left empty when we decided to go back into the grid are still barely utilized, yet we still have this cost that hasn’t been addressed,” Cardenas said. “We have ward superintendents reporting to an empty building… There’s a lot of money being wasted.”
“Nobody else has put a plan together or analyzed the numbers and come up with really hard ideas of what to do… My political base is that taxpayer who doesn’t have any more to give, who sees his property tax bill rising and rising and can’t make ends meet. That’s my base.”
Cardenas’ opponents might take issue with Cardenas’ 2008 decision to dodge the parking meter vote, perceiving it as hardly a profile in political courage. But he will argue the opposite.
“I abstained. I took a pass… It shows that I’m a numbers person and I look at the efficacy of the package,” he said. “That’s the position I took and I will defend that position.”
Johnson has yet to announce a decision whether to run again. During a news conference Tuesday, he chose his words carefully as he addressed the question about a second term.
“I’m enjoying what I’m doing… It’s hard. It’s a tough job. [But] it’s not as tough as having a house full of teenagers. And it’s been an incredible joy” Johnson said. “Who would have thought that a middle child of ten coming from a working class family with no political ties — or special arrangements to create a trajectory for me — [would] run one of the largest economies in the world?”