The deer in the headlights is Mayor Brandon Johnson
He is frozen by the blinding lights of naming new department heads or keeping existing ones
Now that the Johnson Administration’s transition report has been released, we have a decent idea of how the mayor would like to proceed with his government. What we don’t have is who will carry out those plans and ideas. Undoubtedly, there is a massive pile of resumes of job seekers that arrived in the human resources department since Johnson was elected. He may very well have lost some highly talented folk through his inaction. Conceivably, he could retain all of the current department heads. There but no law or policy requires the mayor to dump current department heads.
However, we know that in local government and politics the axiom rings true-”to the victor goes the spoils.” The spoils in this case are dozens of six-figure paying appointments, and influencing who many of those department heads bring in to lead various divisions,
Sure, they all current department heads signed undated letters of resignation when they accepted the jobs; but that doesn’t mean Johnson has to fill in the date, especially now.
Ironically, before Brandon Johnson took office, he publicly proclaimed he wanted to replace Dr Allison Arwardy - the architect and face of the city’s pandemic plan. The mayor has been in office two months, and Arwardy is still in her post as the head Chicago’s Commissioner of Public Health. Frankly, it would be an enormous mistake to move her out. There is an institutional memory and strategy there that a newcomer won’t come close to having. Why none of the former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s appointments have not been terminated or replaced is still a mystery. However, two Lightfoot appointees, Housing Commissioner Marisa Novara and Human Resources Director Chris Owen have left of their own accord, meaning the mayor has even more slot
Even though the city has a new mayor, the folks running the departments are operating like they did under the old mayor. If Johnson truly wanted and understood the changes needed he would have made decisions by now on who is running the various departments. His inaction reinforces the notion, that as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union, he had a plan to get elected but no plan to govern. CTU is the juggernaut that propelled Johnson to a close victory in the runoff election.
The first-time mayor needs to be made to understand the longer he waits to make appointments the tougher it will be to implement his vision. Delaying means whatever the staff in the various departments has been working on, the more entrenched and attached they will be to those strategies and plans. A new department head won’t be able to reverse that in the short term. In many departments, hundreds of staff members will be asked to change or adjust how they have been operating the past four years. Psychologists and sociologists have repeatedly reinforced that generally people don’t like change.
This week the mayor will be presented with the names of three individuals, one of whom he should consider naming the next superintendent of the CPD. We can only hope his decision-making paralysis will be cured by then, and the city will have a permanent top cop in place. This is critical appointment as the police department continues to operate under a federal consent decree- a federal order dictating needed improvements within the department and to to date, targets that CPD continues to miss.
When Lori Lightfoot took office there were the distractions of her being the first Black female mayor, as well as the first openly gay mayor. A lot of unnecessary media and public attention was focused on that, but Lightfoot swiftly moved past it to put in place the players she believed would help her and the city.
There is nothing historic about Johnson’s election so he is not forced to deal with such distractions. At some point however, the mayor must recognize that Chicagoans voted for him to do more than show up at special events, after-the-fact news conferences, and ribbon cuttings.