Larry Suffredin Will Not Seek Sixth Term On Cook County Board

EVANSTON, IL — Five-term Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin announced Friday he will not run again next year.

First elected in 2002, Suffredin said he will complete the final year and a half of his term and would not support any specific successor to his 13th District Cook County and Cook County Forest Preserve Board seat.

Looking back on his two decades on the boards, Suffredin said he hopes he is remembered as someone who brought transparency and new processes to county government, leading to better services for the public.

Suffredin recalled that when he first got to the county board, ordinances were not being codified into a publicly available county code.

"You didn't know what they passed. You had to go see a librarian in the Daley Center who kept track of the law," Suffredin said. "One of the first things I did was pass a codification ordinance."

Similarly, when Suffredin became chair of the Rules Committee in 2010, he found there were three decades of unapproved verbatim records of board business. He said he was able to quickly get caught up and establish a procedure for records to be reviewed and approved within a month of meetings.

Another early change resulted in changes to the procedures for selecting the directors of Metra, Pace and RTA, who are appointed by the county commissioners representing the suburbs. Before Suffredin came to the board, a majority of the seven suburban seats had been held by Republicans.

"They had no rules or anything," Suffredin said. "What used to happen is Carl Hansen and other Republicans would meet in his office and pick who they wanted for those boards and just announce them."

New bylaws were adopted after a former Metra board member, accused in a nearly two-decade kickback scheme, pleaded guilty as part of the federal Operation Safe Roads corruption investigation that wound up sending former Gov. George Ryan to prison.

Two decades ago, the position of Cook County inspector general did little actual oversight, but the reformed, independent office has now become a nationwide model since 2008, according to Suffredin.

"There was a person who had the title 'inspector general' but didn't really have any responsibilities," Suffredin said. "It was more a patronage job."

One of Suffredin's most lasting legacies, the Evanston Democrat told Patch, is likely to be his effort to take control of Cook County Health, the county's public health care system, away from commissioners and give it to an independent board in 2008.

"Prior to that it was a political nightmare, all kinds of people hiding things, and today we know who the leadership is, their meetings are open to the public in a much more open way and much more detailed than when the county board was trying to run it," Suffredin said.

"Political decisions were made instead of health care decisions. The hospital's funds and other things were always available to be moved around by the county board without anybody objecting, and so what we were able to do was to get people who have health backgrounds into running what is one of the major public health systems in the United States."

Suffredin also successfully lobbied to have the administration of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center out of the control of the board and president. A judge ordered the county to reform the facility in response to a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, and state lawmakers transferred control of the detention center to the Cook County chief judge.

The commissioner said he is currently working with the chief judge to establish court procedures to help those facing eviction with legal aid, resources to avoid eviction and foreclosure and opportunities to use mediation instead of court orders to deal with the potential for a wave of residents losing their homes following the end of the eviction moratorium declared last year amid the first wave of the coronavirus.

Heading into the final 18 months of his term, Suffredin said he hopes to strengthen suburban representation on the county board during upcoming redistricting. He said he hopes the remap will distribute pieces of forest preserve property into some of the seven districts that do not include any.

Suffredin also plans to push for a forest preserve bond referendum on the ballot for November 2022 that will cover the cost of restoration and land acquisition in the future. Depending on the final number, he said it would account for an annual property tax increase of about $5 per $100,000 of home value.

"We don't want the forest preserve to be the forgotten government here, because it's one of the most beautiful things we have. When you fly into O'Hare and you look down at that green necklace around the whole Chicago metropolitan area that's our forest preserve, you realize how lucky we are," he said. "That land holds about 85 percent of all the stormwater runoff in the area. It gives us oxygen, because of all the trees. There are so many things that this land does to improve the quality of life in our area that we just take for granted."

Suffredin said he is currently drafting a rewrite of the county's ethics rules. But since there are ethics reform proposals circulating in Springfield, he wants to see if anything will pass before introducing a local version. He said his proposal will require better disclosures of personal finances and potential conflicts of interest, cleaning up some of the confusion in campaign fundraising rules and stronger limitations on nepotism.

Suffredin said he is also advocating for state legislators to conduct a forensic audit of the state's pandemic response to identify improvements and figure out the best lines of authority. He noted his district includes four independent local health departments: Chicago, Cook County, Evanston and Skokie, in addition to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

"As we went through the PPE, went through testing, when through contact tracing, went through vaccinations, there was clearly confusion on every one of those levels," Suffredin said.

"I really believe that when we do a forensic audit of how we responded, while we have some of the best people around, we need to have a better system for responding to pandemics and other issues," he added. "I want to spend time on that, and then strengthening our own health care system and how it responds to things like the pandemic."

Evanston and Skokie's independent health departments date back nearly a century to when their communities had more resources. They, along with Chicago and Cook County, have seen reduced funding over the years as the American health care system evolved. And, like most public health departments, they found themselves underfunded heading into the pandemic.

"There was a movement to get them out of direct treatment, to have them become much more public health education than public health treatment," Suffredin said. "There used to be a lot of public health clinics where you could get vaccinations, you could get your school physicals, you could get dental [treatment], now our health and hospital system has clinics that do some of that, but they're not under the umbrella of our public health department."

Suffredin said it is worth reviewing the state's overlapping layers of public health authority, from Gov. J.B. Pritzker's executive orders to municipalities instead of counties being responsible for business licenses in case of violations of county public health orders.

"[Pritzker] also does not have the authority to tell Chicago or Cook County how to run their public health departments, or Evanston or Skokie. He can make recommendations, somewhat like the CDC is recommending changes to masking. We're not bound to follow those," he said.

"What we really need here is a study to figure out what would be the most efficient way to protect the public in the future."