Mayor Brandon Johnson’s months-long quest to get progressive firebrand Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) confirmed as Zoning Committee chair placed City Council members between a rock and a hard place.
Powerful developers urged them not to vote for Sigcho-Lopez. Johnson and his top aides were pressuring them to support the mayor’s choice.
When Ald. Walter Burnett (27th), who serves as vice mayor, offered himself as a compromise candidate last week, it gave his colleagues a way out, sparing Johnson a political defeat.
On Monday, the Rules Committee backed Burnett’s appointment by voice vote without a word of discussion. Burnett’s appointment now goes to the full City Council for a vote Wednesday.
Burnett, the Council’s dean, likely will now be stuck with a job he never wanted. Zoning Committee meetings drag on because of the scope of the committee’s power. It oversees developments large and small, both residential and commercial.
“I’ve actually got aldermen calling me thanking me for stepping up because it gets them out of an awkward position. They knew I didn’t want to do it. … It’s a lot of work — that’s the longest committee in the world,” Burnett told the Sun-Times last week.
Council members want to “get back to their wards and work. That’s our real job.”
His Near West Side ward is among the fastest-growing in Chicago. Burnett is proud of the “pro-development” reputation he has cultivated with the business community.
His ward includes the United Center, Greektown, Goose Island, River West and the Fulton Market and Illinois Medical Districts. It also includes East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park, as well as the land formerly occupied by the Cabrini Green housing project, where he lived as a child.
Burnett said the heavy pressure to vote against Sigcho-Lopez was coming from “some big people whose names I don’t want to mention.”
Burnett offered everybody — including Johnson — a way out that they all gladly took.
“A lot of us who’ve been around for a long time have relationships with a lot of people, and folks didn’t want to mess up their relationships,” Burnett said. “It was putting people in an awkward position and they didn’t want to go against the mayor either.”
Settlements approved, set for final Council vote
In other Council action Monday, the Finance Committee voted to pay $15 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits, including cases linked to two of the department’s most notorious members, Jon Burge and Ronald Watts.
The proposed payouts stem from five lawsuits filed in state and federal courts since 2019. They now go before the full Council at Wednesday’s meeting.
The biggest settlement — $11.6 million — would go to Anthony Jakes, who falsely confessed to being an accomplice in a 1991 murder when he was just 15 after being beaten by members of Cmdr. Burge’s infamous “midnight crew.” Jakes spent 20 years in prison before being released in 2012.