(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The Cook County Assessor’s Office is celebrating the lifting of a federal consent decree focused that monitored how public employees are hired.
Assessor Fritz Kaegi said the end of federal monitoring is the result of a lot of hard work.
“Training, monitoring -- we went through over 100 hiring cycles to demonstrate that we were following through on this,” he said Tuesday. “We showed our good faith and that we had a durable remedy to that problem that had been found in the consent decree.”
That problem stemmed from 1969 lawsuits alleging political influence in the hiring decisions of many local and state public offices.
“I learned that the legacy of political discrimination and patronage can last for a very long time and is very damaging well beyond the years it takes place,” Kaegi said.
The judge’s decision to lift the consent decree is not only a victory for fairness and ethics in Cook County, it’s also a win for taxpayers, he said.
“It’s going to save a lot of money,” he said. “We don’t have to pay for all the lawyers to engage in all the monitoring and litigation that’s involved with this.”
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