JOSEPH M. FERGUSON INSPECTOR GENERAL
CITY OF CHICAGO OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL 740 NORTH SEDGWICK STREET, SUITE 200 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60654 TELEPHONE: (773)478-7799 FAX: (773) 478-3949
TO THE MAYOR, CITY COUNCIL, CITY CLERK, CITY TREASURER, AND COMMUNITY MEMBERS OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO:
Enclosed for your review is the public report on the operations of the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) during the third quarter of 2021, filed with City Council pursuant to Section 2-56-120 of the Municipal Code of Chicago.
Big cities bear the real-time brunt of our society's inequities and discontinuities. That is why, even in the best of times, big cities operate at the edge. And once in a generation, there are challenges that for some cities take on existential dimensions; at each such juncture, some slip into decline. Chicago has not tipped that way, but we should not blink the fact that it could, for our city is at one of these generational crossroads. Our position there is even more precarious for our carrying the weight of Chicago's historical struggles to build and maintain essential bulwarks of good government. A famous American literary axiom that applies here: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Chicago's past is definitely not dead, nor even past. And its echoing failures of accountability and transparency—often baked into and calcified in its institutions and bureaucracies—corrode even our most determined efforts to effect the reforms needed to meet the challenges immediately before us.
I move on from the twelve-year privilege of serving as Inspector General still confident that Chicago holds in its hands the resources and solutions to this great city's challenges; that Chicago controls its destiny. And I do so equally confident that the talented, dedicated, mission-driven public servants of the Office of Inspector General—a municipal oversight body that is a national model in ways that defy the prevailing negative national stereotypes...
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