Johnson's executive order is begging for abuse
Purported help for the business community comes seven months too late
Shortly after being elected in May, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson assembled a transition team, that although was supposed to be all-encompassing of Chicago, had one glaring omission. There was no representative from the city’s business community.
In apparent attempt to smooth over the tumultuos start to his first seven months in office, Johnson is now to assauge the real estate development sector of the business community with a new executive to trim the regulatory process.
The mayor has put a rush-rush on the timetable for city departments to pitch changes to the regulatory process. Unfortunately, like most of the ideas born in Johnson’s Administration, a close look at this says it is dead-on-arrival. The notion to ask the city’s legion of departments is fraught with issues.
The first among is departments supposedly are in a minimum personnel mode. And that translates into every department having little to no extra bandwith to take on such an unplanned and arduous task. The 90-day limit just about guarantees a rushed job
The second issue is streamlining can also be viewed as trimming staff. It’s unlikely, to put it mildly that co-workers are going to find ways to put one another out of work. If Johnson was truly interested in chaging the process, he would have asked key members of the business community, particuarly small business, to examine the problem(s) based upon experience. Government employees don’t suffer any consequences for poor decisions, or not following directives.
Rather than rely on those drawing a City of Chicago paycheck, Johnson could have made a wiser move by creating roundtable composed of medium and small-sized businesses to make the recommendations to streamline. These are the people on the front lines who can readily identify obstacles operating their businesses based upon current city policies.
Relying on city employees rather than the business community, the mayor undoubtedly will get the recommendations he is seeking. However, given he has no background or expertise in business, he won’t even know if he is getting the best recommendations-especially with the clock ticking toward the 90-day mark. His restructering/streamlining idea is consistent with his basic governing philosphy is ‘let’s try this and see what happens.’
Unless all of the news outlets forgot to report it, Johnson offered no guildance on what the outcome out to be - lower costs for businesses; faster turnaround time for projects to be completed, more revenue for the city, or any other myriad possibilities. That makes it quite clear the results of his demand will be scattered at best. We probably should expect at the end of 90 days; the mayor will not release the results of the departments’ suggestions, and will announce a do-over. This time it wil include directives that should have identified with the initiaal ask.
