Cleanup program 'not a mess at all,' Daley says

June 14, 2005

BY ABDON M. PALLASCH AND TIM NOVAK Staff Reporters

Mayor Daley shrugged off Monday's Sun-Times story that revealed that at least 500 times last year city crews cleaned up privately owned lots at taxpayer expense and falsely marked the lots as being city-owned.

"We clean 'em all -- we know where some of 'em [are], we constantly have problems, we put barriers up," Daley said at the Hilton and Towers, where he is hosting mayors from around the country at a conference. "We work hard. You know that. You take six instances, and we'll go over each one of them. . . . It's not a mess at all."

Daley said there were "six" improper cleanups. His press secretary, Jackie Heard, said there were 10. The Sun-Times found 500 cleanups of lots that crews marked as "city-owned," but which turned out to be privately owned, some of them by clout-heavy associates of the mayor. The Sun-Times ran photographs of 14 of the lots, some of which were visited up to 32 times by the cleanup crews.

And on Monday, a former Streets and Sanitation ward superintendent said she saw first-hand city crews giving special treatment to some businesses, cleaning up garbage on their lots and not issuing tickets as they are supposed to.

Daley and Heard noted that, as Monday's story said, the city plans to suspend eight city employees for improperly using city resources to clean private lots.

Some city crews ignored cleaning vacant residential lots, focusing their efforts on businesses that were never ticketed or forced to pay for the cleanups, according to Sandra Williams-Bey, who was fired as the 20th Ward superintendent last summer.

'The taxpayer has to pay'

"Why would they clean up private businesses, I just couldn't understand that," Williams-Bey said. "That's wrong. The taxpayer has to pay for that. I needed help on the residential lots; I didn't need help cleaning up businesses. And then they don't write tickets" for the businesses.

Williams-Bey claimed the crews would clean businesses around 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. She said she served as one of the city's 50 ward superintendents for seven months until she was fired last June. She said she was never given a reason for her dismissal, but she suspected she upset city Streets and Sanitation officials by trying to discipline one employee for sleeping on the job.

Matt Smith, spokesman for the Streets and Sanitation Department, said Williams-Bey was let go "for performance-related issues, none of them related to vacant lot cleaning. And also for inappropriate behavior toward subordinates ... superiors and even the public."