Dick Simpson discusses the book he edited "Chicago's Future: An Anthology of Reports, Speeches, and Scholarship Providing an Agenda for Change"

Studs Terkel Not too long ago there were headlines in both newspapers, the "Chicago Tribune" and the "Sun-Times" about Jane Byrne and her brouhaha, the one, the difficulty with the "Chicago Tribune" and the banning of a reporter for a time, that was the news. But what was hardly discussed, newspapers and television, was the report itself, the report that made the headlines of both papers, the report of a transition team originally chosen by the newly elected Mayor Jane Byrne, [and?] the city and neighborhoods, and Dick Simpson is my guest this morning. Former alderman of the 44th Ward, two-term alderman 1971-79, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. And the report is one that he most helped write, one that's been sort of dismissed pretty much by the media. So we're discussing that report and what Mayor Byrne commissioned, but did not see. And we'll hear the voice, too, of Mayor Byrne at a certain time shortly after her election. In a moment after this message. [Pause in recording] Suppose we hear, Dick, there was a certain glowing moment. The Machine was beaten. There was a blizzard. There was a primary. And there was an election. And Jane Byrne was elected. It was a stunning upset, and it was about two or three months later I interviewed her for "Life" magazine, and "Life" turned down the article because thought it was not critical enough. So I thought, suppose we hear the voice of Jane Byrne, it's sometime in June or July of the year of election, last year that would be, wouldn't it?

Dick Simpson Yeah.

Studs Terkel Last year.

Dick Simpson Last year,

Studs Terkel And the subject of neighborhoods came up and changes, and we hear her thoughts. [Pause] [unintelligible] upon people of the communities themselves

Jane Byrne -- To

Studs Terkel In some cases, part-time jobs.

Jane Byrne Right. Sure. Yeah, well, our plan is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to clean. And then on Thursday and Friday the cleaning in the community itself. Saturday we're going out there with all our trucks, pick it all up.

Studs Terkel Yeah. You know, one of the big questions in this book, [unintelligible] and throughout, the people in the neighborhoods feel they have no say over their

Jane Byrne That's correct, you're correct, they do.

Studs Terkel You know, people in the neighborhoods feel then they just have

Jane Byrne They're going to have a say. We're cre-- we created the Department of Neighborhoods. I took an--the other department called Mayor's Office of Inquiry and Information. And we're changing the title on that department and calling it the Department of the Neighborhoods, which will be directly responsible to work with the community organizations in those neighborhoods. I found that out, too, and I--want another cup of coffee?

Studs Terkel Great! [pause in recording] We just--this is going--we're going to be wandering as we're talking. I'll come back to the subject of neighborhoods and the department of it.

Jane Byrne Well, this is part

Studs Terkel Yeah, you were saying about you were a commissioner.

Jane Byrne Right. And I really--we ran, there was never a scandal. We did our job. We followed the book, okay, and the book was ordinances, and all we did was enforce them, sponsor new legislation when necessary, and help the public in our role. The other thing I found out when I got out there into these neighborhoods is that I didn't know a darn thing about what the problems were in those neighborhoods, even though I did what I was supposed to do. And I have found, thinking that over, that the various departments all, all run the same way. Board of Health will take care of your health matters. Consumer Sales, consumer affairs. Police will take--but there's no coordination.

Studs Terkel Ah. None.

Jane Byrne None.

Studs Terkel See, now you're hitting something terribly important, not only in the cities, in all our lives. Each department says, "I'll do it," and no interest, and so a child's about to die from lead poisoning, but "It's not my department."

Jane Byrne That's right. That's

Studs Terkel And you're looking for something that'll coordinate--

Jane Byrne That's the neighborhood, Department of the Neighborhoods. I found out in north Austin, for instance, what they're terribly frightened of is that they will lose their little commercial strip. If they lose that strip, their neighborhood will go. You can go into Andersonville, I think it was, all they want in that area they claim, to save their area, to be sure it's stable, is a parking garage. A [snaps fingers] simple thing like a parking garage, because they have to compete with the new shopping centers with the big--and it's little things in every area, and that's only a Department of the Neighborhoods can pull it all together.

Studs Terkel Yeah. There's something, if we stick with the Department of Neighborhoods and that overall, instead of as it has been in the past, this department does it

Jane Byrne Fragmented, right.

Studs Terkel And no other interests, the Department of the Neighborhoods will--in something of that neighbor--even though it isn't technically in that department

Jane Byrne That's correct. That's correct.

Studs Terkel Can

Jane Byrne See, they will get on [snaps fingers], they will be responsible to me, that department. The Commissioner of that

Studs Terkel Can you even--I know it's difficult, can you set a kind of case that would be an example?

Jane Byrne One such as you just said.

Studs Terkel And so it was sort of a glowing moment, wasn't it, there was this discussion of neighborhood and autonomy. Dick Simpson, your thoughts on hearing this passage.

Dick Simpson Well, it's reminiscent of that whole period, of course, the mayor when she ran for the office said that she was for neighborhoods and that she wanted to help the neighborhoods and not only had she promised a Department of Neighborhoods, she had promised a congress of neighborhoods to allow neighborhood people to directly have a voice in her administration. And she had talked about reforming the departments and cutting out the waste and streamlining the government. I remember that because it was somewhat on that premise that people were invited to be part of the transition team. There were about 25 of us appointed. And obviously a number of others were appointed to represent minority groups: a number of Blacks, Lenore Cartwright, Tim Black. A whole series of minorities were, were appointed. A number of independents. Former alderman Leon Dupré and myself, among, among others. A number of people who came from community organizations or different sections of the city, Northwest side, Southwest side, and some people from the business community. And essentially it was meant to be a campaign symbol after she'd won the primary and before she won the general election, that her administration was going to be a new open administration, that it was going to deal forthrightly with the problems of the city, and that she was going to base the administration on the will of the citizens where they live in their communities rather than doing it all downtown. Well, of course what happened, it was great campaign rhetoric. She won the second stage of the mayoralty with the highest vote of any mayor, higher than Richard J. Daley in all of his elections, so as a campaign ploy it was terrific. But the problem is of course that the people on the transition team had taken her seriously. And I, for instance, assembled a team of 20 people out at the University of Illinois and we went to work for a month and a half and produced a 600-page document with 197 recommendations detailed down to the literal ordinances that would have to be passed to implement or the executive orders that would have to be done, cost/benefit ratios of what it costs to pick up a ton of garbage here versus Milwaukee or Philadelphia, and we had done our job, I thought, fairly seriously. We didn't claim that it was the end final word on everything, and we had premised it on the assumption that the Byrne administration would want to have a free and open administration. And of course the first thing the Byrne administration did was to suppress the report.

Studs Terkel What happened to that report?

Dick Simpson The report was delivered by Lou Masotti, about, in stages. I gave Lou sections of the report on a weekly basis from the first of April on through the end of April. And he finally, when he was essentially bounced out of the city administration because he'd gotten too much coverage while the mayor was out of town and had gotten into disfavor, when he was bounced out and not made head of the Department of Planning as originally suggested, or any of the other deputy mayor jobs, he just delivered six volumes altogether in the mayor's hands, and as I understand it, the mayor simply stacked them up over in a corner of the office and forgot about them. And then a couple of newspapers, including the "Chicago Lawyer" began to inquire about the transition team. Could they see the copy of the transition team, what were the recommendations, what was the mayor going to do? And that required that the deputy mayors, particularly Paul McGrath and later Bill Griffin, look at the report in the sense of, could it be released? And the first answer from the Byrne administration said, "Sure. We'll release it, we're former pressmen ourselves, we understand freedom of press, and we know there's a city ordinance saying it had--all consultant reports have to be made public," that had just been passed after Byrne's primary election before she became mayor. And so it looked like it was going to be released, and then at the least the Byrne administration would read it in the newspapers even if they didn't read it in their private copy. But they decided to suppress it, they took the case to court, and the lower court said that they had to release it, and they decided to appeal, and the middle level appeals courts decided they had to release it and they decided to appeal, I think they're gonna probably appeal it on to the Supreme Court, although why they would do that now that it's published is, is unclear.

Studs Terkel Well I ask the question--what, I don't quite understand, why would the administration suppress it? Why would

Dick Simpson It--I think because there's a great problem for the administration with the transition team report. It was written not about the Byrne administration, but about the Bilandic and Daley administrations, and about the incredible problems this city faces and from a premise that an administration would want to be open, that it would want to be concerned with neighborhoods, that it would want to be efficient, that it would want to be cost effective, that it would want to live within its means, and therefore have a streamlined effective participatory government. Now, that begins to set up a measuring rod. Even though it was said about the last administration, it says first, the first day she was in office we recommended that she adopt an executive order called "Freedom of Information" that would require the public documents the public pays for to be available to citizens. Well, those documents are all secret documents. Every document in City Hall that doesn't have to do directly with taxes or be printed on microfilm is a secret document from the citizens of the city. Well, that's an insane idea, and it seems reasonable that the first thing a new administration would want to do is to symbolize well, that it's going to open up things, and it be an open

Studs Terkel Well, it would be to the benefit, I don't quite understand

Dick Simpson Well, it'd be to the benefit of the

Studs Terkel To the benefit of the administration, the Byrne--

Dick Simpson If

Studs Terkel To show how difficult it has been because of the previous administrations.

Dick Simpson Oh yes, they could show, they had six hundred pages of complaints about the last administration.

Studs Terkel Was it really suppressed or is this a phrase you're using now?

Dick Simpson Well, it was kept secret. It was held in an office. There were only four copies ever made of the document. It's not like it's a giant, in a publishing

Studs Terkel Can we discuss the report itself? It was definitely fluffed off by the media. In fact, one pundit on TV on ten o'clock news spoke of a report by Dick Simpson, former alderman, written by his students, and he wants to sell it as a book, as a matter of fact, it is going to be a book by Swallow, part of the report, "Chicago's Future".

Dick Simpson Well, 40 pages of it.

Studs Terkel Yeah, 40 of the 600 pages. But the report itself was not discussed. I know this deals with something you've been thinking about during your two terms as alderman and long before that.

Dick Simpson Well, it was, it was a good--

Studs Terkel About autonomy for [neighborhoods?]--

Dick Simpson Yeah, it was a--we can talk directly about the neighborhoods, but just in terms of the report, it was a good experience for me. I don't regret it even though it didn't get used by the administration. And even though it was a massive amount of work, you know, night and day work for, for two months, for 20 of us. But I don't regret that investment because when you're--even when you're alderman, you don't get to go into the depth. We reviewed 30 of the 65 departments and agencies of the city. And one of things we found, just take the department part of the study, is that nearly all of the departments have a bad mission. They don't understand what they're trying to do. Take the Department of Health. Department of Health, if you read the legal documents, the ordinances that establish it, the state laws and so forth, has a sole mission of preventing epidemics in the City of Chicago. Well, I don't remember when our last epidemic was in the City of Chicago. They must be doing a terrific job because we've not had an epidemic in 30 years. But that isn't what the Department of Health does. The Department of Health runs four full clinics, full-service clinics. They run a dozen different well-baby clinics, mental health clinics and things; they deliver health services to the citi--some of the citizens of Chicago. But since that's not their mission and they've never really rationalized it, they run into competition, they have competing clinics with Cook County Hospital, they compete with the private sector. They--and there's overlapping and mis-expenditure of money because of that. They ref--they finally got control of the Chicago health systems agency, but they fight with all of the other health bodies of, of the metropolitan area and the national government. It is a crazy mishmash system. We got four or five health service delivery systems which do not talk to each other, which literally will not speak to one another, and therefore you might expect our health plan is terrible. The health delivery to the citizens of Chicago is scandalous. That's why we have such a high infant mortality rate, one of the highest in the nation. The infant mortality rate in Chicago compares with some of the underdeveloped countries of the world. Not quite that bad, but very close. For a city of this sort there is just no excuse.

Studs Terkel And what was the report's recommendation?

Dick Simpson Well, what we did was start at the top. We said, "All right. What is it the Board of Health's going to do?" Well, it's not just going to prevent epidemics, it's going to also in fact deliver services as it says. Well, it's going to have to coordinate then with four separate health agencies, this means it's going to have to have some mechanism of coordination between these bodies, and we spelled out what its goals would have to be, how it would do it, then we went into a cost accounting of how they are spending their money currently and what they're getting back [for? from?] it, and some administrative changes, suggesting some personnel changes and suggesting some restructuring of the lines of flow. We did that for 30 of the 65 departments. I had never had the time to look at all that many departments, and what was amazing was, there were very few exceptions that the departments were not either aimed towards the wrong goals or had the wrong administrative structure. We pay in Chicago 50 to 300 percent higher for every service we deliver than any other city in the country. Whether you talk about the cost per ton of garbage picked up or mile of street swept or quart of water delivered to, through the pipes or, you know, gallons of water delivered to the pipes. It doesn't matter. If you make any objective comparison with us and other cities it can obviously be done cheaper because most other cities don't have a patronage system and therefore don't have two employees doing the work of one. And that they don't have an outmoded administrative system that is 50 years out of date. [Which isn't to say?] they don't have some excellent employees and they don't do some individual services well. We found some services that are well done. But it was just that aspect, before you even got into how to deal with neighborhoods, how to deal with honesty, how to deal with a city council, how to--how to keep double-dipping by the lawyers who are supposed to work for the city but have private practices and so on. Before you got into that area, just the way the departments function

Studs Terkel This report had specific suggestions [about that?].

Dick Simpson It had 197 recommendations in the section I wrote.

Studs Terkel About functioning of departments and services

Dick Simpson And new programs that had to be developed, because we thought it was going to be analogous to, say, the Roosevelt New Deal, when you had the 100 days' excitement in the first of the New Deal, or the Kennedy thousand days, the 900 some odd days that Kennedy lived in the new frontier, and what we got was sort of a bad deal. The problem, the basic problem is the Byrne administration, I'm convinced, still does not believe in policy and program. They believe in politics of a rather shrill and loud sort, they believe in bureaucratic games. They believe in power trips. They believe in media relations. But you've got

Studs Terkel -- How does that differ with the previous administrations,

Dick Simpson Well, the previous administrations, which had much graver faults, the one thing I'll say is the Byrne administration has corrected some of the excesses of the previous administrations, particularly in some of the employee areas, but the previous administrations at least made sense, because they were based in Machine politics, so if you understood patronage and if you understood the service delivery system and you understood the politics of service delivery and you knew how Daley had to relate to the big banks, how he had to relate to the business community, how he had to relate to the labor community, the system was sensible. It was one I hated greatly because it produced tyranny and destroyed democracy, but it was a logical system. What you have with the Byrne administration is you do not have a new political majority saying the city council [to? may?] govern. You do not have an administrative structure that is able to carry out the will of the mayor, if the mayor has a will, on, on specific policy areas, and you have no policy guidelines. There's been so little new legislation introduced that it's amazing. I, there are more pending pieces of legislation from when I was alderman, that I personally wrote, there are 200 pieces or so still bouncing around loose down there somewhere from when I was there. That's more than the entire Byrne administration has produced in their first year-and-a-half in office.

Studs Terkel So this 600-page report is lying around and about, the

Dick Simpson

Studs Terkel

Dick Simpson Not too long ago there were headlines in both newspapers, the "Chicago Tribune" and the "Sun-Times" about Jane Byrne and her brouhaha, the one, the difficulty with the "Chicago Tribune" and the banning of a reporter for a time, that was the news. But what was hardly discussed, newspapers and television, was the report itself, the report that made the headlines of both papers, the report of a transition team originally chosen by the newly elected Mayor Jane Byrne, [and?] the city and neighborhoods, and Dick Simpson is my guest this morning. Former alderman of the 44th Ward, two-term alderman 1971-79, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. And the report is one that he most helped write, one that's been sort of dismissed pretty much by the media. So we're discussing that report and what Mayor Byrne commissioned, but did not see. And we'll hear the voice, too, of Mayor Byrne at a certain time shortly after her election. In a moment after this message. [Pause in recording] Suppose we hear, Dick, there was a certain glowing moment. The Machine was beaten. There was a blizzard. There was a primary. And there was an election. And Jane Byrne was elected. It was a stunning upset, and it was about two or three months later I interviewed her for "Life" magazine, and "Life" turned down the article because thought it was not critical enough. So I thought, suppose we hear the voice of Jane Byrne, it's sometime in June or July of the year of election, last year that would be, wouldn't it? Yeah. Last year. Last year, 1979. And the subject of neighborhoods came up and changes, and we hear her thoughts. [Pause] [unintelligible] upon people of the communities themselves -- To In some cases, part-time jobs. Right. Sure. Yeah, well, our plan is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to clean. And then on Thursday and Friday the cleaning in the community itself. Saturday we're going out there with all our trucks, pick it all up. Yeah. You know, one of the big questions in this book, [unintelligible] and throughout, the people in the neighborhoods feel they have no say over their [lives?]-- That's correct, you're correct, they do. You know, people in the neighborhoods feel then they just have no They're going to have a say. We're cre-- we created the Department of Neighborhoods. I took an--the other department called Mayor's Office of Inquiry and Information. And we're changing the title on that department and calling it the Department of the Neighborhoods, which will be directly responsible to work with the community organizations in those neighborhoods. I found that out, too, and I--want another cup of coffee? Great! [pause in recording] We just--this is going--we're going to be wandering as we're talking. I'll come back to the subject of neighborhoods and the department of it. Well, this is part of Yeah, you were saying about you were a commissioner. Right. And I really--we ran, there was never a scandal. We did our job. We followed the book, okay, and the book was ordinances, and all we did was enforce them, sponsor new legislation when necessary, and help the public in our role. The other thing I found out when I got out there into these neighborhoods is that I didn't know a darn thing about what the problems were in those neighborhoods, even though I did what I was supposed to do. And I have found, thinking that over, that the various departments all, all run the same way. Board of Health will take care of your health matters. Consumer Sales, consumer affairs. Police will take--but there's no coordination. Ah. None. See, now you're hitting something terribly important, not only in the cities, in all our lives. Each department says, "I'll do it," and no interest, and so a child's about to die from lead poisoning, but "It's not my department." That's right. That's what's-- And you're looking for something that'll coordinate-- That's the neighborhood, Department of the Neighborhoods. I found out in north Austin, for instance, what they're terribly frightened of is that they will lose their little commercial strip. If they lose that strip, their neighborhood will go. You can go into Andersonville, I think it was, all they want in that area they claim, to save their area, to be sure it's stable, is a parking garage. A [snaps fingers] simple thing like a parking garage, because they have to compete with the new shopping centers with the big--and it's little things in every area, and that's only a Department of the Neighborhoods can pull it all together. Yeah. There's something, if we stick with the Department of Neighborhoods and that overall, instead of as it has been in the past, this department does it or Fragmented, right. And no other interests, the Department of the Neighborhoods will--in something of that neighbor--even though it isn't technically in that department -- That's correct. That's correct. Can See, they will get on [snaps fingers], they will be responsible to me, that department. The Commissioner of that department. Can you even--I know it's difficult, can you set a kind of case that would be an example? One such as you just said. And so it was sort of a glowing moment, wasn't it, there was this discussion of neighborhood and autonomy. Dick Simpson, your thoughts on hearing this passage. Well, it's reminiscent of that whole period, of course, the mayor when she ran for the office said that she was for neighborhoods and that she wanted to help the neighborhoods and not only had she promised a Department of Neighborhoods, she had promised a congress of neighborhoods to allow neighborhood people to directly have a voice in her administration. And she had talked about reforming the departments and cutting out the waste and streamlining the government. I remember that because it was somewhat on that premise that people were invited to be part of the transition team. There were about 25 of us appointed. And obviously a number of others were appointed to represent minority groups: a number of Blacks, Lenore Cartwright, Tim Black. A whole series of minorities were, were appointed. A number of independents. Former alderman Leon Dupré and myself, among, among others. A number of people who came from community organizations or different sections of the city, Northwest side, Southwest side, and some people from the business community. And essentially it was meant to be a campaign symbol after she'd won the primary and before she won the general election, that her administration was going to be a new open administration, that it was going to deal forthrightly with the problems of the city, and that she was going to base the administration on the will of the citizens where they live in their communities rather than doing it all downtown. Well, of course what happened, it was great campaign rhetoric. She won the second stage of the mayoralty with the highest vote of any mayor, higher than Richard J. Daley in all of his elections, so as a campaign ploy it was terrific. But the problem is of course that the people on the transition team had taken her seriously. And I, for instance, assembled a team of 20 people out at the University of Illinois and we went to work for a month and a half and produced a 600-page document with 197 recommendations detailed down to the literal ordinances that would have to be passed to implement or the executive orders that would have to be done, cost/benefit ratios of what it costs to pick up a ton of garbage here versus Milwaukee or Philadelphia, and we had done our job, I thought, fairly seriously. We didn't claim that it was the end final word on everything, and we had premised it on the assumption that the Byrne administration would want to have a free and open administration. And of course the first thing the Byrne administration did was to suppress the report. What happened to that report? The report was delivered by Lou Masotti, about, in stages. I gave Lou sections of the report on a weekly basis from the first of April on through the end of April. And he finally, when he was essentially bounced out of the city administration because he'd gotten too much coverage while the mayor was out of town and had gotten into disfavor, when he was bounced out and not made head of the Department of Planning as originally suggested, or any of the other deputy mayor jobs, he just delivered six volumes altogether in the mayor's hands, and as I understand it, the mayor simply stacked them up over in a corner of the office and forgot about them. And then a couple of newspapers, including the "Chicago Lawyer" began to inquire about the transition team. Could they see the copy of the transition team, what were the recommendations, what was the mayor going to do? And that required that the deputy mayors, particularly Paul McGrath and later Bill Griffin, look at the report in the sense of, could it be released? And the first answer from the Byrne administration said, "Sure. We'll release it, we're former pressmen ourselves, we understand freedom of press, and we know there's a city ordinance saying it had--all consultant reports have to be made public," that had just been passed after Byrne's primary election before she became mayor. And so it looked like it was going to be released, and then at the least the Byrne administration would read it in the newspapers even if they didn't read it in their private copy. But they decided to suppress it, they took the case to court, and the lower court said that they had to release it, and they decided to appeal, and the middle level appeals courts decided they had to release it and they decided to appeal, I think they're gonna probably appeal it on to the Supreme Court, although why they would do that now that it's published is, is unclear. Well I ask the question--what, I don't quite understand, why would the administration suppress it? Why would they It--I think because there's a great problem for the administration with the transition team report. It was written not about the Byrne administration, but about the Bilandic and Daley administrations, and about the incredible problems this city faces and from a premise that an administration would want to be open, that it would want to be concerned with neighborhoods, that it would want to be efficient, that it would want to be cost effective, that it would want to live within its means, and therefore have a streamlined effective participatory government. Now, that begins to set up a measuring rod. Even though it was said about the last administration, it says first, the first day she was in office we recommended that she adopt an executive order called "Freedom of Information" that would require the public documents the public pays for to be available to citizens. Well, those documents are all secret documents. Every document in City Hall that doesn't have to do directly with taxes or be printed on microfilm is a secret document from the citizens of the city. Well, that's an insane idea, and it seems reasonable that the first thing a new administration would want to do is to symbolize well, that it's going to open up things, and it be an open house. Well, it would be to the benefit, I don't quite understand it-- Well, it'd be to the benefit of the citizens To the benefit of the administration, the Byrne-- If To show how difficult it has been because of the previous administrations. See? Oh yes, they could show, they had six hundred pages of complaints about the last administration. Was it really suppressed or is this a phrase you're using now? Well, it was kept secret. It was held in an office. There were only four copies ever made of the document. It's not like it's a giant, in a publishing venture. Can we discuss the report itself? It was definitely fluffed off by the media. In fact, one pundit on TV on ten o'clock news spoke of a report by Dick Simpson, former alderman, written by his students, and he wants to sell it as a book, as a matter of fact, it is going to be a book by Swallow, part of the report, "Chicago's Future". Well, 40 pages of it. Yeah, 40 of the 600 pages. But the report itself was not discussed. I know this deals with something you've been thinking about during your two terms as alderman and long before that. Well, it was, it was a good-- About autonomy for [neighborhoods?]-- Yeah, it was a--we can talk directly about the neighborhoods, but just in terms of the report, it was a good experience for me. I don't regret it even though it didn't get used by the administration. And even though it was a massive amount of work, you know, night and day work for, for two months, for 20 of us. But I don't regret that investment because when you're--even when you're alderman, you don't get to go into the depth. We reviewed 30 of the 65 departments and agencies of the city. And one of things we found, just take the department part of the study, is that nearly all of the departments have a bad mission. They don't understand what they're trying to do. Take the Department of Health. Department of Health, if you read the legal documents, the ordinances that establish it, the state laws and so forth, has a sole mission of preventing epidemics in the City of Chicago. Well, I don't remember when our last epidemic was in the City of Chicago. They must be doing a terrific job because we've not had an epidemic in 30 years. But that isn't what the Department of Health does. The Department of Health runs four full clinics, full-service clinics. They run a dozen different well-baby clinics, mental health clinics and things; they deliver health services to the citi--some of the citizens of Chicago. But since that's not their mission and they've never really rationalized it, they run into competition, they have competing clinics with Cook County Hospital, they compete with the private sector. They--and there's overlapping and mis-expenditure of money because of that. They ref--they finally got control of the Chicago health systems agency, but they fight with all of the other health bodies of, of the metropolitan area and the national government. It is a crazy mishmash system. We got four or five health service delivery systems which do not talk to each other, which literally will not speak to one another, and therefore you might expect our health plan is terrible. The health delivery to the citizens of Chicago is scandalous. That's why we have such a high infant mortality rate, one of the highest in the nation. The infant mortality rate in Chicago compares with some of the underdeveloped countries of the world. Not quite that bad, but very close. For a city of this sort there is just no excuse. And what was the report's recommendation? [As Well, what we did was start at the top. We said, "All right. What is it the Board of Health's going to do?" Well, it's not just going to prevent epidemics, it's going to also in fact deliver services as it says. Well, it's going to have to coordinate then with four separate health agencies, this means it's going to have to have some mechanism of coordination between these bodies, and we spelled out what its goals would have to be, how it would do it, then we went into a cost accounting of how they are spending their money currently and what they're getting back [for? from?] it, and some administrative changes, suggesting some personnel changes and suggesting some restructuring of the lines of flow. We did that for 30 of the 65 departments. I had never had the time to look at all that many departments, and what was amazing was, there were very few exceptions that the departments were not either aimed towards the wrong goals or had the wrong administrative structure. We pay in Chicago 50 to 300 percent higher for every service we deliver than any other city in the country. Whether you talk about the cost per ton of garbage picked up or mile of street swept or quart of water delivered to, through the pipes or, you know, gallons of water delivered to the pipes. It doesn't matter. If you make any objective comparison with us and other cities it can obviously be done cheaper because most other cities don't have a patronage system and therefore don't have two employees doing the work of one. And that they don't have an outmoded administrative system that is 50 years out of date. [Which isn't to say?] they don't have some excellent employees and they don't do some individual services well. We found some services that are well done. But it was just that aspect, before you even got into how to deal with neighborhoods, how to deal with honesty, how to deal with a city council, how to--how to keep double-dipping by the lawyers who are supposed to work for the city but have private practices and so on. Before you got into that area, just the way the departments function was This report had specific suggestions [about that?]. It had 197 recommendations in the section I wrote. About functioning of departments and services and And new programs that had to be developed, because we thought it was going to be analogous to, say, the Roosevelt New Deal, when you had the 100 days' excitement in the first of the New Deal, or the Kennedy thousand days, the 900 some odd days that Kennedy lived in the new frontier, and what we got was sort of a bad deal. The problem, the basic problem is the Byrne administration, I'm convinced, still does not believe in policy and program. They believe in politics of a rather shrill and loud sort, they believe in bureaucratic games. They believe in power trips. They believe in media relations. But you've got -- How does that differ with the previous administrations, then? Well, the previous administrations, which had much graver faults, the one thing I'll say is the Byrne administration has corrected some of the excesses of the previous administrations, particularly in some of the employee areas, but the previous administrations at least made sense, because they were based in Machine politics, so if you understood patronage and if you understood the service delivery system and you understood the politics of service delivery and you knew how Daley had to relate to the big banks, how he had to relate to the business community, how he had to relate to the labor community, the system was sensible. It was one I hated greatly because it produced tyranny and destroyed democracy, but it was a logical system. What you have with the Byrne administration is you do not have a new political majority saying the city council [to? may?] govern. You do not have an administrative structure that is able to carry out the will of the mayor, if the mayor has a will, on, on specific policy areas, and you have no policy guidelines. There's been so little new legislation introduced that it's amazing. I, there are more pending pieces of legislation from when I was alderman, that I personally wrote, there are 200 pieces or so still bouncing around loose down there somewhere from when I was there. That's more than the entire Byrne administration has produced in their first year-and-a-half in office. So this 600-page report is lying around and about, the report Well, Provisions They

Studs Terkel But they would not discuss the nature of it.

Dick Simpson Yeah, the problem is, if you take an area, let me just take one or two other examples, then we'll get to neighborhoods, the, maybe the heart of the matter. Take a simple area like pensions. I mean, it's simple in terms of its effects, you don't have to be too bright to understand. If I tell you that we have in the pension programs a little more than two-and-a-half billion dollars of capital, okay, and billion's a big number, but if we have two-and-a-half billion dollars of capital and if I then tell you that in my guess, that if you take all the pension funds less than 5 percent of that is reinvested in Chicago, and when the "Chicago Reporter" magazine just did a study to update it in one fund, they found that the best they could do is say that 15% might be thought to be invested in Chicago, 85% was not. One way of thinking

Studs Terkel Where's the rest of it go?

Dick Simpson Well, it goes into Canadian pipeline, it goes into Arab oil, it goes into South Am--South African businesses, it goes mostly into the Fortune 500. We own bonds of the city of Philadelphia. To give you an idea of how crazy this is, the reason you buy things like municipal bonds is of course because then you'll get a tax break. You don't pay taxes on it. But pension funds do not pay taxes. So there is no advantage to a pension fund to invest in another city's bonds.

Studs Terkel So you--the paper--

Dick Simpson The paper goes

Studs Terkel Had specific suggestions that were feasible?

Dick Simpson Oh, yeah.

Studs Terkel

Dick Simpson That We--I mean, it's not simple, but because there are a lot of--the state law's a very bad law governing pensions. But two-and-a-half--if you only leveraged back 10%, that'd be 250 million dollars tomorrow morning that you could have for housing, for economic development in the ghettos, [if you imagine?] what happened if you invested 200, if Mayor Byrne tomorrow morning announced, "Well, the pension plans have been pulled together. They're going to make very safe investments, they're not going to risk anybody's money. They're going to invest in solid companies or in guaranteed certificates, but 250 million dollars is going to go into Woodlawn, Englewood, the communities of Chicago that most need it, the West Side of Chicago," 250 million dollars could be reinvested, you know, not in a single day, but in one hunk, and that could be done every year with good, good

Studs Terkel So, that's one aspect of it. These suggestions have been lying around somewhere--

Dick Simpson Yeah, and they're--

Studs Terkel On a, somebody's table or, or in a storage room.

Dick Simpson And there just, I mean, no one believes us, I mean, no one will believe that anyone could be so foolish as to waste two-and-a-half billion dollars of capital when you can't get capital to develop a city.

Studs Terkel Now, this paper. And there was a--let's go, I want to come down to other aspects of the paper and other recommendations, too, including the nature of autonomy in the ward as something that you had practiced as alderman of the 44th Ward, ward assembly, the idea of that. But back to the paper. There was a transition team. I think they were--I remember distinguished Chicagoans, everyone was excited, of various groups of Chicago as well as independents and people pretty hip to things. And this report is one they had sponsored. Is that the idea?

Dick Simpson Well, we were never allowed to meet together, but essentially there was contact back and forth. And--

Studs Terkel Why were you never allowed to meet together?

Dick Simpson Well, because the theory which the team was operated under was that everyone would work out their individual contribution and give it to Lou Masotti, and Lou Masotti would deliver it to the mayor right at the right moment when the mayor was ready to embark on that aspect of program, which was an okay theory in its own way, it wouldn't be the way I would probably run something, but it's, it's a, it's a theory of how to administer it. Of course, when Lou Masotti was bounced out, the theory fell to nothing. We were then without a transmission belt to the administration, and it looks like even if a Lou Masotti had been in the city government, that Byrne would've paid no attention or kept him on six months and then kicked him out without implementing the

Studs Terkel Yeah. Back to this paper, because I'm thinking of that moment when I interviewed her a month-and-a-half or so after her election, it was a rather glowing moment, and her vision was a good one on--

Dick Simpson Yes.

Studs Terkel You just heard a portion of the conversation. It went on--

Dick Simpson Yeah, that she was going to hear the neighborhoods, that she understood that they felt they were left out, that the department heads didn't understand, she was absolutely right about all that.

Studs Terkel Yeah.

Dick Simpson And I think she just has no notion of how to implement it and she's had this report which goes step-by-step, I mean it said, it said, "Day one: introduce this ordinance or executive order. Day two: don't just have a Department of Neighborhoods. If you--you promised the citizens a congress of neighborhoods. Here's what a congress of neighborhoods looks like: it will meet in city council chambers once a month. It will be chaired by either you or your head of the Department of Neighborhoods. It will have five representatives from each of the 50 wards. They will be chosen in the following fashion," and down to the nitty-gritty of how to establish a steering committee and agenda. Now, all those could be improved upon, but it's not as if, you know, it's often [actually?] well, the mayor couldn't really implement the congress of neighborhoods which she promised, before her election she promised there'd be a congress of neighborhoods. I'm not sure it's the best idea in the world. I'm not sure I would recommend it if I were starting from scratch, but that's her promise. And some people might say, "Well, she didn't--there was no way to do it. How can you ever get all the people together?" Well, the transition team was very clear. There was no great difficulty, that was a relatively simple part of our task was figuring out the mechanics of a congress of neighborhoods.

Studs Terkel What is the congress of neighborhoods, how would that work?

Dick Simpson Well, what it'd be is, it'd be a monthly meeting of representatives from each community of the city who would, would advise the city administration on how the departments should behave and what should be done to benefit all the neighborhoods of Chicago. It would be an advisory council, if you will. The mayor would be foolish to overlook their recommendations consistently, that she would have to take some of them, I think. It would be a sounding board that we don't have now. What the mayor has now is she can yell and scream and get on television and the citizens will see it on their TV set and say "good" or "bad." But there is no communication between the mayor and the citizens, there's no way. So she has to either believe the aldermen, and Machine alderman are not a good transmission belt, you can't believe that they understand their neighborhood problems in a proper perspective, and they're not diverse voices. You know, the mayor is isolated. The mayor gets, as far as I can tell, she gets advice from her husband. And that may be the entire extent of it, or she gets it from five other advisers or ten. This is a city of three million people, this is a metropolitan area of seven-and-a-half million people, you need to have the rough and tumble of ideas at work, and you need to have it from the bottom up. You don't need to have dictums coming out of City Hall. You need to have information, debate, discussion, deliberation, and wise decision-making, and you're not getting that.