Preckwinkle boasts of accomplishments
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle Wednesday marked her 100th day in office with a “report card” in which she insisted that fully one-third of 33 key initiatives had already been completed, then looked ahead to the challenges remaining.
“We focused in the first 100 days on the budget first and foremost,” Preckwinkle said in a news conference outside her office in the Cook County Building in downtown Chicago. She allowed that she was slow to fill what she regards as key positions in her administration, “but given the demands on us,” she added, “I think we've done pretty well.
“The question is what are we going to do over the longer term?” Preckwinkle said. “And in my view we have to make county government more efficient, to figure out how to provide good services to people, with fewer resources. And that is certainly the challenge going forward.”
Preckwinkle said government employees would most likely have to accept compensation cuts, especially in health care and pension benefits.
“She's ready to tackle it head on, and so am I,” responded Bartlett Republican Commissioner Timothy Schneider, adding that 85 percent of county costs go to employee compensation. “There's going to be more cuts.”
“She's doing things that have to be done, and I give her credit for it,” added Glenview Republican Commissioner Gregg Goslin.
Preckwinkle said she would work toward the annexation of unincorporated areas of the county as an additional long-term way to reduce spending. “The question is whether we can work with adjacent municipalities to incorporate these unincorporated areas into the community so that the county no longer has responsibility for them,” she said, especially in offering police protection. “My goal would be to reduce the amount of unincorporated land in Cook County substantially over time. But that involves cooperation with local municipalities.”
Schneider, however, said that issue “has to be looked at very carefully,” in what a municipality was taking on and what an unincorporated area was getting and receiving in annexation.
Preckwinkle's report card mentioned “ending (the) tax subsidy to unincorporated areas” as an unfinished goal, and said her administration would consider the “impact of a new tax for unincorporated areas and recommend how to streamline services.”
Schneider said that could be a tough sell, as unincorporated areas don't receive county services on the order of an average suburb. “I don't think you can overburden unincorporated residents,” he said.
Preckwinkle's achieved goals, however, according to the report card, included the 2011 balanced budget, the full sales-tax rollback, to be completed at the start of 2013, a moratorium on nonessential capital projects and a desk audit of the more than 500 employees under her office, completed Wednesday, and to be expanded countywide.
Schneider said Preckwinkle has done “a remarkable job” — not just in her achievements, but in her relationship with the suburbs. “She has reached out to communities beyond Chicago, reached out to suburbs, to include them in the process.”