311 Is Like An Expensive Broadway Show That Gets Previewed In Chicago

Let the Richard Daley/Michael Bloomberg comparisons begin:

Throughout his five-and-a-half years as mayor, Mike Bloomberg has come across as something of a revolutionary in pinstripes, tearing down the old ways of doing things and replacing them with methods based on reason, data and cool calculation.

He consolidated all of the city’s customer service numbers into 311, centralized the school system and came up with a plan for New Yorkers to breathe the cleanest air of any big city by the year 2030.

The true inventor of these policies, though, was not the Jewish boy from Medford, Mass., but rather an Irish pol from the near south side of Chicago. Back in 1995 — when Mayor Bloomberg was just a glimmer in CEO Bloomberg’s eye — Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley got rid of his Board of Education and soon after started holding failing kids back. In 1999, Mr. Daley implemented 311 (yes, the same number New York has). By 2001, he had declared his intention to make Chicago the greenest city in the country and started planting flowers on top of City Hall to prove it.

“When the C-40 summit came, I gave the opening night’s reception speech and I unabashedly said we have stolen from cities all over the world,” said Dan Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, referring to the C-40 Large Cities Climate Summit held in New York in May. “Chicago, as the city in many ways the most similar to New York in the U.S., is the prime target.”