In the void created when Mayor Richard M. Daley announced his retirement last year, the man who would become Chicago’s next leader appeared headed for conflict with the most powerful figure in Daley’s City Council.
An eventual détente between Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel and Edward Burke, the 14th Ward alderman and veteran chairman of the council’s Finance Committee, was announced formally on Tuesday. But it seems the two had decided weeks ago that the best course was to move beyond Burke’s support for one of Emanuel’s mayoral election rivals and forge a deal in the best Chicago tradition.
Emanuel appeared last month as the guest of Burke at the Catholic Theological Union’s $500-a-ticket annual dinner. In the Hilton Chicago ballroom on the evening of April 27, Emanuel sat at Burke’s table and stepped forward to address the crowd briefly, praising Burke and saying they had met many times before the event, which is called the “Blessed Are the Peacemakers Dinner.”
“I thought it was priceless,” said the city clerk-elect, Susana Mendoza, who also sat at the table at Burke’s invitation and recounted the scene. “Chairman Burke is a survivor because he knows how to work with people.”
For more than two decades, Burke has effectively controlled the purse strings of City Hall. Emanuel had threatened to strip Burke of the Finance Committee position during the campaign, but he now supports keeping Burke in control of what historically has been the council’s most important committee after Monday’s inauguration of the new mayor and council.
Still, some in City Hall wonder whether Emanuel has created a path to circumvent Burke’s committee, if necessary. Alderman Patrick O’Connor (40th Ward), who is viewed as a more reliable ally for the mayor, is slated to take the helm of a newly created committee that could instead shepherd crucial financial legislation.
O’Connor had been among the earliest supporters of Emanuel’s mayoral bid, and he was the first person whom Emanuel greeted after leaving the podium where he delivered his election-night victory speech.
O’Connor predicted no tensions between the new mayor and the council dean, but he said the responsibilities that the Finance Committee would retain were not yet clear.
“Exactly how it will work or how it plays out — some things remain to be seen,” O’Connor said. “This isn’t about trimming the Finance Committee as a playing-out of any personality conflict.”
One critic said the continued prominence of Burke and other veteran allies of Daley could test Emanuel’s campaign promise to change the contours of city government so that it works for the people rather than for insiders.
“This City Council reorganization is nothing but a reshuffling of old Daley administration players,” Alderman Ricardo Munoz (22nd) said. “It’s no reform plan.”
Burke did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
Twenty-two years ago, he seemed to be in a similarly tenuous position. Daley, his longtime rival in the South Side Irish political class, had assumed office promising to mend the divisions of the racially charged “Council Wars” era. Burke had drawn widespread scorn during the 1980s as a leader of the white bloc of council members who frustrated the agenda of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.
Rather than try to crush Burke, Daley carved out a peaceful and mutually beneficial coexistence with Burke, whom he had defeated in the 1980 race for Cook County state’s attorney. Burke kept tabs on the council for Daley, and the mayor passed no judgment as Burke amassed a long list of lucrative law clients who do business with city government.
The council as a whole might have been derided as a rubber stamp for Daley, but Burke undoubtedly was the biggest shark in the aldermanic pond.
Now in his 42nd year in the council, Burke, 67, comes across more like a Wacker Drive C.E.O. than the boss of a blue-collar ward.
At council meetings he often wears a finely tailored pinstripe suit with an emerald-green tie and handkerchief. That is no doubt an expression of pride in his ancestry, just like the rug in his third-floor office that could pass for the surface of a mini-golf course. His visage almost always stern behind wire-rimmed glasses, Burke likes to begin his council speeches with a quotation, perhaps Aristotle or an old Irish folk saying.
The council alpha dog’s bite is worse than his bark. After years of one-sided votes in favor of Daley’s agenda, Burke may be among the few aldermen with a deep understanding of the parliamentary process governing the city’s legislative branch.
Alderman Joe Moore (49th) was foiled by a parliamentary maneuver that Burke employed when Moore tried to oppose a Daley administration plan last year.
“He has a very commanding knowledge of City Council rules and procedures and a very commanding knowledge of how city government operates,” Moore said.
Many observers speculated that Burke could also use his deep political war chest to win council allies and block Emanuel’s legislative agenda. While he has been among the biggest political fund-raisers in the city’s history, Burke has been relatively stingy with that money, state records show.
His political committees have raised almost $12.5 million in the past decade, according to a Chicago News Cooperative analysis of state campaign-finance disclosure documents. He has donated only about $2.8 million during that period, and much of that went for contributions and tickets to charity events, rather than to his allies.
The personal wealth of Burke and his wife, the State Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke, is not known. As he has in most years, Burke reported that in 2010 he had dozens of law clients who do business with the city. Last year, he reported that 39 clients who have city business were worth at least $5,000 in fees to him in 2010.
Burke’s personal interests and public duties frequently clash on the council floor. During the last four-year council term, of the 559 instances when aldermen refrained from voting on measures that touched on their personal interests, more than 300 of them were invoked by Burke.
City records show that one of Burke’s children, Edward M. Burke Jr., briefly worked as a City Hall lobbyist. The younger Burke reported taking on two clients with interests in city government last year, including a Naperville company that conducted a pilot program of energy-efficient street lights for the Daley administration.
The contract with PolyBrite Inc. was signed on Sept. 15 and was supposed to pay $7,500 a month to the younger Burke for one year, records show. Two days after the February city election, however, he told city officials that he no longer was lobbying at City Hall.
Even rivals like Munoz, who helped a narrowly failed campaign to unseat Alderman Burke’s brother from the state legislature last year, acknowledge that Burke takes care of his constituents and those who help him as aggressively as he pursues his lucrative side work.
“He knows the system,” Munoz said, “and he works it.”