- The heads of the Chicago police and firefighter unions are commenting today on how the residency ruling for mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel might affect the rule requiring city workers to live within the city limits.
Mark Donahue, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, says he’s tried for the past few years to get the legislature to change the law so Chicago police could go to the bargaining table with the city and negotiate over whether police could live in the suburbs. Donahue says the FOP will make that legislative push again this session.
Donahue says he doesn’t know whether any legal connection can be made between yesterday’s Illinois Supreme Court ruling for Emanuel and the city’s employment rule.
Chicago Firefighter Union leader Tom Ryan says he’s had members who’ve lost their jobs because they didn’t live in the city of Chicago. He says he doesn’t know whether yesterday’s Illinois Supreme Court ruling will have a bearing on those or any other cases.
Media Picks Up on Residency
Evidently, someone at the main stream media noticed the same thing our readers did - the Illinois Supreme Court language is opening a door:
As was pointed out in our comment section some time ago, the national FOP regularly wins residency lawsuits. Their winning percentage approaches that of the NRA's record over nonsense gun laws. And from what we see in the comment sections of the various media sites covering this portion of the story, most people would be happy to have the police move out of their neighborhoods. The words "no great loss," "leave already," "it's police kids who are the problem" appear with startling regularity. We had no idea that there was so much support for police and firefighters leaving the city.