Ald. Ed Burke (14), powerful chairman of the city council Finance Committee, has taken issue with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to end free water for Chicago’s nonprofits.
According to the City of Chicago, more than 6,000 nonprofits get free water and reduced sewer charges, a cost to the city of $17 million. Emanuel is trying to erase a $653 million budget deficit.
When Burke and other alderpeople singled out churches and Catholic schools for an exemption, however, the media were quick to jump on the idea.
Chicago Tribunecolumnist Eric Zorn quoted the law. According to Article 10, Section 3 of the state constitution, “No governmental entity shall ever make any appropriation or pay from any public fund whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatever."
But Burke, as veteran and savvy a politician as there is in Chicago, hit home with another salient point.
“Politically, it's kind of a hard vote to take,” he told the city council — so hard that the alderpeople were outdoing each other with critical remarks about the proposed cuts.
Ald. Ray Suarez (31) said that churches should be exempt because “they are doing the Lord’s work.” (Suarez didn’t say whether he meant that everyone else was not.)
Ald. O’Connor, a staunch ally of previous Mayor Richard M. Daley and his floor leader, cut himself some separation from Emanuel with Yogi Berra-style remarks to a Channel 11 panel discussing the proposal.
“Those churches are being paid for by people that attend church anyway,” O’Connor said. “They’re just paying it in a higher personal water bill than in the church’s water bill — so factually speaking, we’re all paying for those water bills, we’re just paying it twice: We pay it in our own water bill, because we pay more, and then we pay when we go to our church or our synagogue or wherever.”
Many churches have traditionally marched in lockstep with Chicago’s Democratic machine. Most of Chicago’s mayors for the last century have been Catholic, and the archdiocese has always had the mayor’s ear. Protestant ministers in the African American community also wield clout, never more than when Harold Washington was mayor in the 1980s.
The singling out of churches and religious schools, however, would inevitably lead to expensive lawsuits that the city would almost certainly lose. It’s highly likely that Burke and others were grandstanding for the faithful before acquiescing to Emanuel’s request.
Rahm Emanuel is Jewish, so Burke’s first sally since the election was an intriguing one.
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