Times are never tough for Ed Burke.
The debonair chairman of the city council's finance committee always has a minute for busybody ordinances, but never a moment to actually vet City Hall's most complicated proposals. Like oh, say, those involving 75-year parking meter leases and billion-dollar Olympic Games.
Now, in the midst of an economic meltdown that has thrown the city's budget into chaos, he's decided it's a good time to do a little remodeling around the (taxpayer-funded) office, according to the Sun-Times.
That threadbare carpet?
For the proles.
Those lousy chairs?
Not befitting.
Politics
Terrible symbolism?
Who cares.
New paint on the walls?
By all means!
Burke's little office re-do sounds like a low-cost affair, but just as it's not only the extra quarters in the meters that make folks mad, or in this case a few coats of new paint, it's the everyday nickel-and-diming of we citizens while the fat cats go about their (taxpayer-funded) jobs with a mind-boggling sense of entitlement.
"We have at least seven areas of carpeting that are torn," Burke spokesman Donal Quinlan told the Sun-Times. "Many of them are patched over with wide, unsightly silver duct tape so people don't trip."
That's life in a recession, sir. Please learn to deal with it like the rest of us.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
