The Daley administration has had a ...

The Daley administration has had a federal hiring monitor for a year now. still that's apparently no guarantee City Hall hiring is delivered of politics.

Take the case of Lucious Jone the niece of Illinois Senate President Emil Jone She was hired June 26 as a $31.15-an-hour sewer laborer for the Department of Water Management.

For years, Emil Jone serv as a house drain inspector for the Department of Sewers, later merg into Water Management. He retired after an internal investigation of alleged rampant ghost-payrolling on house drain inspectors.

Lucious Jone was lately reassigned from the north to the central district, a transfer Water Management spokesman Tom LaPorte insisted was "mutually agreed to by means of Jones and her supervisors" and was "not an adverse action."

The latest in a series of transfers reportedly came after co- workers warned Lucious Jone to "watch her back" because of her political pedigree, sources said.

"She's not alone in being transferred a number of times. It's our policy to incline them routinely among crews and between districts during training for a like reason they can be exposed to various duties and work beneath different foremen," LaPorte said.

Water Management was at the center of a Hired deal scandal that has branched abroad into city hiring. But LaPorte insisted that politics played no part in the hiring of Lucious Jone

"The Department of Human Resources recruits and qualifies candidates. They have a lottery Then we memorize a list of candidates who fill on the outside questionnaires specific to the work at jobs As soon as we have enough race who pass medical and medicine exams, we stop. It's all overseen by the agency of the federal monitor," LaPorte said.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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