Indicted Chicago Ald. Edward Burke is choosing not to seek reelection to a record 15th term.
Indicted Ald. Edward Burke chose not to seek reelection to a record 15th term — including the two-year term served after a special election to fill the vacancy created by his father’s death — in a ward dramatically redrawn to eliminate his most favorable precincts.
Ald. Ray Lopez , Burke’s ally and City Council seatmate, said Burke’s outsized "footprint" is all over legislation that has "impacted everyday life" in Chicago. That includes a trailblazing ban on indoor smoking and Burke’s campaign to mandate carbon monoxide detectors and defibrillators and help champion a ban on phosphates.
Last summer, Dan Burke urged his big brother to retire from politics and focus on his health, his family and his upcoming trial on federal corruption charges rather than risk a humiliating defeat in a ward redrawn to exclude Garfield Ridge, a more conservative white area near Midway Airport that was the source of his greatest political strength.
Among them: that Burke tried to extort legal business from 601W Companies, developers of the Old Post Office, in exchange for his help with a variety of matters, including an $18 million tax increment financing subsidy, a $100 million tax break and help resolving issues with Amtrak and the city’s Department of Water Management.
He’s been in the public spotlight for having taxpayer-funded bodyguards drive him to and from City Hall and for how quickly city snowplows clear the street where his fortress of a Southwest Side home is located. Jacky Grimshaw, who served as Washington’s director of intergovernmental affairs, said Monday she is not fooled by the new Ed Burke and neither are most African Americans.
Since being deposed as Finance Committee chairman, then silenced and humiliated at Lightfoot’s first City Council meeting, Burke has been a mere shadow of his former self. "They’ll miss his institutional knowledge. But in terms of that old style of governing, they’ve moved on. It’s a whole new council. Some of the people who are in office in council weren’t even born when he became an alderman."
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