April 1, 2009
Three main topics of this meeting were inspecting the Capital Fund budget, complying with court orders (Duran Decree and Shakman Decree) against Cook County government, and the contact bid process.
Early in the meeting, Comm. Peraica forcefully noted that the county is still spending millions of dollars because of court case pay outs due to patronage in the system. He also stated that the Duran (court) decree needs to be addressed by the board. This entails spending about $8.4 million for Cook County jail software (keeping track of the inmates and their court appearances--the current system failed recently for 18 hours) and about $5 million for the replacement of two outdated buildings (which will take until 2011 to complete). After consultation with Comptroller Morales, it was decided to use money in the operating budget to begin these expenditures immediately. The $8 million amount would be added to the Capital Fund budget.
Comm. Sims proposed that to comply with the Shakman (court-ordered) Decree each department head evaluate the job descriptions, titles, and placement of people in these jobs under their direction. After discussion with newly hired Human Resources director Joe Sova, it was decided this could and should be done within each department for no extra cost. The HR department could help with this but does not have the man-power to do the whole job.
There was a heated discussion among commissioners about the bidding process for contracts in Cook County. One contract for interpreters in the court system has been rebid four times since early fall. Comm. Silvestri complained that the bid process is too cumbersome and confusing to vendors and that good vendors may stop doing business with Cook County because of this. The bid process has caused controversy at many board meetings I have attended since September.
Commissioner Schneider proposed that the board go over each line item in the Capital Fund budget to see where cuts could be made, ostensibly to lower the bond amount.
Comm. Beavers stated that there was no need to go over this budget again. He indicated it was a tactic to delay choosing a bond team, stating that if the bond team were white instead of African-American, this would have been done already. I left the meeting after that, but according to the next day's newspaper, enough items in the capital fund budget were deleted to bring the total down over $20 million from about $262 million. Further cuts were to be looked at during the continuation of this meeting on Thursday.
