The abrupt resignation Wednesday of Chicago Housing Authority executive director Zirl Smith ended his nearly three-year power struggle with CHA chairman Renault Robinson, but the mayoral campaign is likely to keep the controversy boiling.
Smith, the public housing professional who was hired to turn around the agency that administers housing for 145,000 of Chicago`s poorest residents, submitted letters of resignation to Mayor Harold Washington and to the CHA executive board.
In accepting the resignation without argument, Washington, in effect, took the side of Robinson, a controversial former police officer and political activist. Smith was brought to Chicago in April, 1984, to correct the CHA`s many problems, which had escalated when Robinson briefly headed the agency.
Some of Washington`s top aides helped engineer the final controversy–the blaming of a $7 million loss in federal fund on alleged mismanagement by Smith. And in the aftermath of the resignation, the administration made Robinson and Brenda Gaines, Smith`s interim successor, available to the news media to make it publicly clear who had won the long battle.
In announcing the resignation, Washington had high words of praise for Smith and the CHA operation and said he would recommend that Gaines, who has held several government positions under the mayor, most recently as his deputy chief of staff, be named interim executive director.
Minutes later, the CHA executive board in a special session accepted Smith`s resignation, named Gaines interim director and heaped words of praise on Smith.
But if comments from the mayor`s office and CHA board members were conspicuously polite and diplomatic, those from Washington`s political opponents, including some who are running against him in the mayor`s race, were not.
Almost uniformly, they praised Smith, criticized the CHA and condemned Robinson for allegedly politicizing the agency while stripping the executive director of most of his powers.
”The resignation of Zirl Smith is a sad day for the CHA and its 143,000 residents–the wrong guy quit,” said Cook County Assessor Thomas Hynes. ”The housing professional leaves, and the political operative who undercut him remains in power.”
Hynes, who withdrew as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for mayor Wednesday and plans run as a third-party candidate, last week had called for Robinson`s resignation from the CHA board.
Hynes traveled to the City Hall press room to hold a news conference and repeated his call for Robinson`s ouster and an audit by the federal General Accounting Office of CHA expenditures.
”The misappropriation and improper expenditures have multiplied to the point that the financial condition of the CHA has become increasingly tenuous,” Hynes said.
Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th), who is running for mayor as the Illinois Solidarity Party candidate, said that Robinson should have stepped aside and let Smith do his job. ”He was qualified, but the Robinson-Washington politics prevented him from doing his job,” Vrdolyak said.
Also coming under criticism was the announcement that Smith would be retained, at least until his contract expires on May 15, as a CHA
”consultant,” with unspecified duties. Smith will be paid the approximately $20,000 that remains of his annual $84,000 salary. Gaines also will be paid an annual $84,000 a year as long as she remains in the job, the executive board decided.
Ald. Edward Burke (14th), a leader of the anti-Washington bloc in the Chicago City Council, described the consultant`s job as the equivalent of
”hush money” to keep him from attacking Robinson and CHA policies.
”Apparently, they have given Mr. Smith consultant`s contracts so he will keep his mouth shut about the sewer of inefficiency, corruption and incompetence that currently exists in the CHA,” Burke said in a City Hall news conference.
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Former Mayor Jane Byrne, who named Robinson to the CHA board during her administration, placed the entire controversy on the shoulders of Washington. Byrne, also a candidate for mayor, said Washington should order an investigation of the entire CHA and the possible loss of $7 million in federal funds to the CHA because of an administrative foul-up.
”I think this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Byrne said.
Smith came to the CHA in April, 1984, after a nationwide search for a replacement for Robinson, who, while serving briefly as executive director and chairman, committed a series of administrative errors. His firing of the agency`s elevator repair and maintenance workers before finding suitable replacements for them resulted in a rash of elevator breakdowns and water pipe problems during a spell of unseasonably cold weather in December, 1983.
Smith and Robinson were foes from the beginning. And 15 months ago, Robinson managed to drastically strip away Smith`s responsibilities, including most of the day-to-day operations of the nation`s second-largest public housing agency.
Smith reportedly had become dismayed by the mayor`s unwillingness to restrain Robinson from seizing control of critical administrative functions.
One CHA insider, who asked anonymity, said: ”Over the last 15 months, Robinson, with the approval of the board, progressively stripped Smith of authority over virtually every key function and division within the agency, including transferring control over the CHA`s legal, auditing, finance, purchasing and personnel departments from the executive director to the chairman and the board.
”In effect, they reduced Smith to little more than window dressing. He retained the title of executive director, but in reality, in the end, he had virtually no power or authority to direct anyone or anything at the CHA.”
Smith`s dismay was intensified last week when Robinson, along with Ernest Barefield, Washington`s chief of staff, informed the news media that the CHA had lost $7 million in federal funding when it missed a Dec. 31 deadline to award contracts for security improvements at the agency`s Robert Taylor Homes housing project. They laid the blame squarely on Smith, although the executive director denied it.
Missing federal deadlines is a common occurrence in governmental agencies, usually correctable by filing applications for extensions, but Smith reportedly viewed the attack as another move by Robinson to undercut him, sources close to Smith confided Wednesday.
Smith met with Washington Tuesday afternoon and, according to sources, asked the mayor to help him recover his responsibilities by harnessing Robinson`s continuing attack on him. The mayor said he had to retain Robinson at the CHA for ”political considerations,” the sources said.
After that meeting, Smith submitted his resignation.
Although Robinson has been a staunch backer of Washington, Gaines, the new interim director, has been an even closer adviser to the mayor and reportedly was assured that she will regain virtually all of the executive responsibilities that Smith had lost.
Still, Robinson is expected to stay on as CHA chairman, a position he was given by Washington in August, 1983, and, as such, is expected to be a political lightning rod for candidates seeking to deny the mayor a second term.
Although Washington`s strength in the Feb. 24 primary election is likely to remain firm in the black community, some CHA residents, perhaps
disenchanted by the CHA`s problems, even with a black mayor, might not turn out to vote in the record numbers that they did in the 1983 contest.
And in the lakefront wards, liberal voters who cast decisive swing votes in the last election might react negatively to the victory of Robinson over Smith in the CHA power struggle.
”If I became a liability to the mayor, I would step down,” Robinson said Wednesday.
To fend off some of the lightning, Alton Miller, Washington`s press secretary, gathered up Robinson and Gaines in his own car and drove them to Chicago television stations for live interviews on the early news programs
–they gave live radio interviews on his car telephone along the way.
”It`s called getting on the live spots before someone else does who isn`t as acquainted with the details,” Miller said.
In contrast, Smith, after the special board meeting, refused to discuss the power struggle, gave thanks to the CHA`s 2,500 employees and boarded an airplane for Washington, D.C., to start drumming up business for his new consulting firm.