Director Suspended for Using Outside Voice

Somebody snitched.

From the Chicago Defender:

Chicago revenue director suspended over e-mail

CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has suspended his revenue director for a day after an e-mail sent to police supervisors warned that the city was falling short of targets for parking ticket revenue.

Daley was critical of the e-mail, calling it "just stupid."

A Daley spokeswoman says Revenue Director Bea Reyna-Hickey will serve a one-day suspension. The spokeswoman says Reyna-Hickey was sanctioned because she's ultimately responsible for her department

In the e-mail, a Revenue Department official said the number of parking and "vehicle-compliance" tickets issued during the first seven months of 2010 had dropped to about 642,000 from more than 850,000 during that period last year.
...

There are some things that virtually everyone who draws a City of Chicago paycheck knows.

They know that City Hall makes it constantly and vividly clear to every city manager that revenue collection and generation needs to be uppermost in their minds.

They know that virtually every city department -- no matter how small -- in under steady, harassing pressure from the 5th floor to cut costs everywhere, increase services everywhere and to find new ways to bring in dough.

They know that the police department tracks revenue collection against projections with a feverish, moment-by-moment intensity one usually associates with tracking incoming nuclear missiles.

They know that whenever any department falls below its performance projections -- especially its money projections -- the Hall will come down on it like the wrath of Almighty God, as the countless emails which have rained down on those departments for years constantly remind them.

And they know that you are never, ever supposed to communicate any of this in a way that is black-and-white enough to draw a clear, straight line between Cops and Revenue. And certainly not in a way that can be documented, replicated, forwarded and backtracked to City Hall policies.

They know that the only approved method of communicating the many, many things which-everyone-knows-but-no-one-must-say is via a complex series of clicks, whistles, winks, nudges, gestures, throat clearings and eyebrow raising. (this dog, for example

is widely rumored to have learned everything it knows from "Whispering" Vic Reyes.)

The lesson the rest of the country took from L'Affaire Blagojevich is that Illinois politics is corrupt right down to its wingtips.

The lesson City Hall took away was apparently the same it always takes from such things: "Keep yer fucking pie hole shut!"

Or, in the bluntly eloquent words the Da Mare's daddy: "Don't make no waves--don't back no losers."

Director Reyna-Hickey permitted someone in her house to break this most cardinal rule of Chicago clout, and for that she must spend one day in the penalty box as an object lesson to others.