If you want to know what’s wrong with any of the current candidates for president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, check out his opponents’ TV sound bites on the news at ten. If you want to know what’s wrong with Cook County government, consider the massive, decrepit structure on West Harrison Street that serves as Cook County Hospital.
Even the existing facilities are poorly used. A new study of county government by the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois, “Cook County: The Sleeping Giant,” reports that there is a costly lack of coordination between city-operated clinics and the County Hospital; for example, patients sent from the clinics to the hospital often have to repeat diagnostic tests because the doctors at County don’t trust or can’t get access to the results obtained at the clinics. Meanwhile more than a dozen inner-city hospitals have closed, as have parts of the University of Illinois Hospital, which is located just a few blocks from County but has not been linked with county health-care needs. This lack of coordination and planning will end up costing county taxpayers millions.
County government may be invisible or sleeping, but it is not unimportant. It is roughly two-thirds the size of Chicago’s city government, runs the world’s largest single court system, maintains the jail and the offices of state’s attorney and sheriff, operates the forest preserves, assesses and collects taxes for local governments, and has home-rule authority to take on many other tasks.
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Also, the county government is plagued by fragmentation and duplication, Quinn argues: 5 different county offices play some role in taxing and disposing of property, and 11 offices have staff for processing county revenues. Lack of coordination in the criminal justice system lengthens the time inmates are locked up at County Jail, leading to overcrowding and the expensive construction of new jails.
“For a long time county government was moribund, and people didn’t care much about it,” Quinn says. “Now all of a sudden people say, ‘Where has the county been all these years? Why hasn’t it taken prudent steps?’”
The degree of consensus among these four is partly a testimonial to the force of varied reform ideas long bottled up. For example, all the candidates appear to favor a countywide “human rights” (including gay rights) ordinance and single-member districts for county commissioners. One can question how much the candidates are to be believed–a subject we’ll come to later–but to judge from their campaign rhetoric, at least, they essentially agree on many of the county’s problems and their solutions.
Abortion: Here the lines are clear. All but Lechowicz favor immediate resumption of abortions at Cook County Hospital, reversing Dunne’s unilateral order to stop. Lechowicz has long been against abortion but says he wouldn’t stop County Hospital abortions in cases of rape, incest, or endangerment of a woman’s life; nor would he veto a County Board decision to resume abortions at the hospital in general.
