• A.D. Q&A on Chicago City Council attendance

  • Apr 11 2022
  • Length: 39 mins
  • Podcast

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A.D. Q&A on Chicago City Council attendance

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  • What if you skipped half the meetings you were supposed to attend for work? A third? A quarter? Could you still be effective? Would you still know everything you needed to do your job well? To earn your full paycheck? That’s what you should ask of your elected representatives, too. On this week’s show, we’re digging into an investigation that Crain’s, WBEZ and The Daily Line published this week about how often members of Chicago City Council show up. There’s good news: aldermanic attendance improved since the last term that ended in 2019. Back then, the average alderman attended only 65 percent of all the meetings they were supposed to – that includes committee meetings where the real sausage-making happens, and the full City Council, where things get final approval. This time, the average alderman attended just over 80 percent of required meetings. That’s a big jump, but still represents hundreds of absences. And the lowest-ranking alderfolks – including one under indictment and two running for higher office – showed up less than 60% of the time. Along with reporters Erin Hegarty and Alex Nitkin of the Daily Line and WBEZ’s Claudia Morell, A.D. Quig sorted through nearly 11,000 records from May of 2019 through the end of 2021 to get you these answers. On this show, we take you behind the scenes of our reporting process. We wrote three stories for this analysis: one breaking down the numbers, where you can look up how you're alderman did; another about whether virtual meetings are here to stay – and the drawbacks to it; and a third about what we called do-nothing committees, ones with big budgets and important mandates, but that meet rarely. We break down what our findings say about how Council works… and doesn’t. You can read all three stories, for free, at chicagobusiness.com, wbez.org and thedailyline.com. We all want to hear from you, too. How does this change your opinion about your alderman or alderwoman? What else do you want to know? We’re here to listen and eager to report more. Until then, let’s get to it. Here’s A.D.'s conversation with The Daily Line’s Alex Nitkin and Erin Hegarty and WBEZ’s Claudia Morell.
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