Mayor Emanuel is transparent about plans to keep his meeting schedule secret

For some reason Mayor Emanuel became a bit testy when Fox Chicago asked him last week about his habit of finding time to meet with big donors and wealthy Wall Street guys, which Ben Joravsky and I detailed in a Reader cover story.

First of all, the mayor said (see the two-minute mark of this video), he meets with lots of people who aren’t on the schedule, including firefighters he chatted with at a fire station recently. “I don’t think they’re fat cats,” Emanuel said.

As for the people he meets with who are fat cats—well, the mayor didn’t really talk about them, except to suggest that they’re part of his overall strategy to keep Chicago moving forward.

No, wait—my mistake. He didn’t say that. It was Mayor Daley who wanted to keep Chicago moving forward. Mayor Emanuel wants to break from the past. He wants to focus on “shaping our city’s future.”

“I’ll go anywhere to create jobs and economic opportunity in the city of Chicago,” he told the guys at Fox Chicago.