Days after his appointment as alderman of the First Ward, Proco “Joe” Moreno, is being billed as the headlining guest at a fund-raiser for the First Ward Democrats' political organization. Hosts of the event include some of the biggest names in local politics, including Cook County Democratic Party chairman Joseph Berrios and alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who ran as a reformer to win the Democratic primary for county board president.

Room 201A in City Hall is typically a place where aldermen gather for committee meetings, which is to say it’s where they gather to discuss and vote on legislative proposals whose future has almost always been determined ahead of time. Most major legislation before the council comes from the office of Mayor Daley, who also selects which aldermen sit on which committees, who chairs those committees, and therefore how robust an agenda they can pursue, if they’re allowed to pursue any at all.

That’s also the room where Mayor Daley holds his press conferences after City Council meetings—where he lists his accomplishments and deflects most of the tough questions by being funny, getting angry, or veering off on a tangent that’s just too bizarre and entertaining to interrupt.

On Monday morning, though, the room was the setting for a far different sort of assembly: City Clerk Miguel del Valle and a bunch of good government types told reporters about steps they’re taking to make the council’s dealings easier to follow and easier to evaluate. They even talked about what else they'll do to keep aldermen in line.

But it sounds like members of Pittsburgh's city council have heard Chicagoans grumbling about our deal and want to learn more before they enter into one of their own.

Leslie Hairston—one of five aldermen to vote against Chicago's meter agreement—appeared at one of their meetings and answered their questions for a couple of hours Thursday. Daley administration officials were invited, too, but our mayor and his people declined the offer.

In an interview Friday afternoon, Hairston said it was well worth her time—and that it presented a stark contrast to the lack of deliberation that preceded Chicago's deal.

What they really wanted to talk about was the way the city spends the roughly $500 million a year generated by its TIF program. They're calling for 20 percent of it to be set aside for affordable housing.

Four months later Carothers is on his way to prison and the police board discussion has been shelved while aldermen await further orders from the mayor.

As the Reader first reported, last month the mayor’s office posted a help wanted ad on the city’s Web site inviting applications for the two aldermanic seats, left vacant when Manny Flores resigned to head the Illinois Commerce Commission and Isaac Carothers pleaded guilty to taking bribes from a developer.

By law the mayor gets to fill open council seats by appointment, and until this point Daley has made his selections behind closed doors in consultation with the departing alderman and the ward's Democratic committeeman. But after the Carothers plea, Daley appeared sensitive to charges of backroom deal making and went with a more open process.

Never fear—hell hasn't frozen over.

Rosenzweig, the chief administrator of Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, had been trying to make the first point, but she didn’t seem to be persuading all of the two dozen people who’d gathered in the Uptown library to hear her talk Tuesday evening.

Now that you've recovered from the excitement of this news, I'll explain: that's a document detailing how much waste residents and businesses in the state are generating each year, how much of it's being recycled or composted, and how much is being trucked to landfills. And the latest edition, covering 2008, shows that the state continues to produce garbage at a rate that's dangerous to the environment and costly to the economy. Our way of doing business in Chicago is mostly to blame.

Apple and Scheuch have asked artists to meet at least once with their alderman of choice as part of the art-making process. Reader contributor Jim Newberry and Jennifer Greenburg are among the artists who have agreed to participate (and have ponied up the $20 registration fee).

Two aldermen (Vi Daley and George Cardenas) attended the project's kick-off party at the Debonair Social Club on February 5. They and the rest of the Chicago Council will be invited to the opening reception. The League of Women Voters of Chicago will be on hand to register people to vote, and Old Style will provide refreshments.

Ten alderman remain unclaimed. Artists can pick one and get on board at chicagoaldermenproject@gmail.com.

This dispatch out of Vancouver will resonate with anyone who thought Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics was a bad idea.

I guess we dodged that bullet. Maybe we can get someone from the International Olympic Committee to run for mayor.

Yesterday afternoon I wrote about how I'd been trying for nearly four months to get Mayor Daley's people to set up a time when we at the Reader could sit down with him to talk about privatization, tax increment financing, transparency in the city budgeting process, and other issues we've been writing about for years—and which he's discussed with other members of the media since last fall.

A couple hours later I received an e-mail from Vanessa Hall, the mayor's scheduler and assistant press secretary. It got right to the point:

Over the last several months, other news organizations—including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Public Radio—have asked the mayor for comment about our reporting on the parking meter lease deal, the budget, the city's Olympic bid, and the mayor's tax increment financing program during press conferences and in-person interviews. We'd love the chance to ask the mayor about those things ourselves.

"In the private sector, you manage it, get out of the business of McCormick Place, in the sense that it should be fully privatized. Then you can run the costs down. Each show runs their own costs," Daley told Channel 7.

After the parking meter mess, any major privatization effort is going to be a tough sell politically—and rightfully so. But this is one that could actually make sense.

The emphasis is on could.

To know why, you'd have to ask the aldermen who've chaired the committee at the mayor's pleasure. For years that was Patrick O'Connor, one of Mayor Daley's top council allies. When he stepped down in 2007 Daley picked 17th Ward alderman Latasha Thomas to take his place.

This afternoon, though, Thomas held a meeting at the behest of aldermen Pat Dowell (Third Ward) and Freddrenna Lyle (Sixth), who have called on schools chief Ron Huberman to impose a moratorium on school closings. "Due to a lack of transparency and community involvement, there is a growing distrust regarding CPS's decisions," they stated in a resolution [PDF] introduced to the council last week.

Naturally, the meeting was quickly engulfed in a dispute over just how much transparency and community involvement it should include.

Sure, you have to live in either the 1st or 29th Ward. But if you do, the mayor himself would like to hear from you. From a press release posted on the home page of the city's Web site:

"Mayor Richard M. Daley is seeking residents of the 1st and 29th Wards who are interested in being considered for Aldermen to apply to fill the vacancies in those wards. Applications should be submitted to the Mayor's Office by Friday, February 19, 2010."

Or worse. “I think this is just the latest way for people to make money off state and local governments,” Krislov, a public interest attorney, said in an interview in his office the other day. “This is the new way the investment banks, their lawyers, and consultants squeeze the taxpayers.”

The account in question is designated “for the employment of personnel as needed by the aldermen to perform secretarial, clerical, stenographic, research, investigations or other functions expressly related to the office of alderman”—in other words, for damn near anything they please. It’s budgeted a total of $1.3 million each year, or about $26,000 per alderman.

The sponsor of the ban, 38th Ward alderman Tom Allen, spoke the truth when he said it represents a modest step toward reforming city government. “When you build a pyramid, you have to build it brick by brick,” he told the Sun-Times.

Fair enough. But if he’s sincere about reform, he should keep pressing for more accountability in the budgeting process. As a next step, he could push for making detailed records of exactly who and what these taxpayer funds are spent on available to the public. And he shouldn’t limit the initiative to this one account.

"I think after the Carothers issue, people are losing confidence in government," Mayor Daley said yesterday, according to the Tribune. "It broke the camel's back."

The camel was apparently in fine health before Carothers pleaded guilty to bribery and tax evasion last week, becoming the latest local elected official to run afoul of the feds.

The camel wasn't at all affected by Daley's complete co-opting of the City Council, his use of patronage workers to bully opponents and win elections, the Duff scandal, the Hired Truck scandal, the illegal hiring scandal, his support for the installation of Todd Stroger as county board president, the decline of city services, the festering murder problem, the deterioration of the CTA, the deterioration of the city parks, the privatization of public space, the privatization of the public schools, the sale of the parking meters, or the use of taxpayer money to subsidize profitable corporations while the rest of us are trying to pay our property taxes or rent.

There are a couple of problems with the comparison.

SEIZING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY: Lisa Madigan wins!!! And so does Jesse White!!! Having no opponents helps.

THE RIGHT SHOWS ITS MIGHT: Or at least its impact on GOP primaries. For awhile last night it looked like so-called moderates might be making a comeback in the form of gubernatorial candidate Kirk Dillard and Senate candidate Mark Kirk. But then conservative Bill Brady slipped past Dillard by a few hundred votes (they’re still being counted) and Mark Kirk delivered a victory speech comparing his campaign with the American fight for democracy in WW I. It sounded like 2004 all over again.

What was interesting was that he didn't act surprised or angry. And of course he didn't say no.

"I haven't heard anything like that," he said.

Yesterday, of course, Carothers pleaded guilty in federal court to accepting bribes and failing to tell the tax man about some of the political favors he's received. He then resigned his seat in the City Council.

“Someone needs to talk about infrastructure!” proclaimed Wallace Davis III, who supervises sewer maintenance for the city’s water department. He pushed himself away from the table, where we were eating a late breakfast of catfish, cabbage, and mac 'n' cheese in the back of Wallace's Catfish Corner, a west-side institution owned by his father, former alderman Wallace Davis Jr. “Someone needs to talk about catch basins! Someone needs to protect our basements from flooding!”

It’s not the kind of speech that catapults people to the upper reaches of politics, but it made sense for Davis, one of nine Democrats, three Greens, and two Republicans running for the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago.