As the race for mayor of Chicago hits the home stretch, the top four contenders for that office sat down on Monday for a debate on WTTW. Host Carol Marin spent the first part of the debate focusing on the city's fiscal troubles and discussing a new report by the Civic Federation, which says the city is on the brink of bankruptcy. As potential fixes to the city's problems, candidates discussed pension reform, privatization, and changes to the makeup of the City Council.
Gery Chico said the situation wasn't quite as bad as the report made it seem. "This is not as horrible as you're portraying it," he said . "People are going to sit in a room and work this out." When the issue of pension reform came up, City Clerk Miguel del Valle, referencing past comments by Rahm Emanuel that cutting current pensions could be on the table, said, "We can certainly do that with new hires, but I don't think that with
current employees, we should be reducing their pension benefits, even
prospectively. It is wrong." Both del Valle and Carol Moseley Braun made it clear that existing pensions would not be touched if they were elected mayor.
Another solution floated by Marin was changes to the City Council. That part of the conversation focused on Ald. Ed Burke (14th Ward), the chairman of the Finance Committee. Emanuel
brought up a security detail that follows Burke and said, "There will be a shared sacrifice, including for Ed Burke and all the
City Council. If Ed Burke has six police officers, that just can’t
continue." Del Valle said the council had an "unhealthy dependence" on Burke and that, "It shouldn’t be one-person rule — you can’t have everything going through one alderman." All four candidates agreed that the city's 19 committees will need to be reduced.
Of course, the debate also included criticisms of the candidacies for mayor. Moseley Braun was asked if the way she managed her personal finances disqualified her. Moseley Braun pivoted, saying, "I didn’t leverage my public office to make millions of dollars, I could have, but I didn’t." The comment was aimed at Emanuel's tenure on the board of Freddie Mac and Chico's law firm. Following the debate, Chico said Emanuel's unwillingness to answer questions about his time at Freddie Mac made him a "pathological evader of the truth."
Two other candidates, Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins and William "Dock" Walls, were not invited to the debate and were sent away when they showed up and tried to attend.
Choosing a black consensus candidate for Chicago's mayoral race was, to be frank, an epic failure. But not in the way in which former State Sen. Rickey "Hollywood" Hendon implied when he 
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