As regular readers know, Chicago Ald. Manny Flores (1st Ward) has been pushing hard this year to force some long-overdue transparency on Mayor Daley's administration.  First, Flores managed to push through the tax increment financing sunshine ordinance, an unprecedented effort to finally crack open Daley's TIF piggy bank. Months later, he won approval for the asset lease disclosure ordinance, which opens the books on how proceeds from the "great Chicago sell-off" are being managed. Now Flores is taking on the Olympics.  During an appearance on WTTW last month, he called Daley's handling of the bid "irresponsible" and declared "enough is enough."

Flores returned to the Chicago Tonight set last Thursday to discuss the issue again and gave the Daley administration low marks -- a four out of ten -- for failing to follow through on some basic accountability measures. "We still have a ways to go," he told host Carol Marin, saying that there's still no evidence that the Chicago 2016 bid committee is: a) able to raise the sort of private money they will need to pay for the games, or b) able to guarantee that a mysterious insurance policy will ultimately shield taxpayers from cost overruns. The responses from Chicago 2016's Doug Arnot only highlighted the need for more transparency. Those annual financial reports, he told Flores, will "be available when they should be." And the insurance policy? It's "still inappropriate to talk about." Flores responded, "I'm not going to wait." Watch it (full video here):

FLORES: I'm not going to wait, I'll tell you that Carol. I'm not going to wait  until the end of a fiscal year or a calendar year before I get information so I can distribute it to the citizens of the city of Chicago. And so I will say this -- I don't know why we have to make this harder than it really is. Given the way technology is, you see the federal government they have a mandate right now with the way that they use the money from the Recovery Act. Why not adopt the same principles? Why not adopt the same principles of the Asset Disclosure Act? Now we require that assets be posted online with the revenue that we generate through asset lease and to provide a line-by-line itemization of how that money's being used. Why not require that we put other information, perhaps statements of ethics, online?

Daley and the 2016 Chicago organizers ought to know that an already skeptical public isn't going to be satisfied with less. After all, that's been a recurring theme during Chicago 2016's ongoing "50 wards, 50 meetings" public relation blitz. It's going to take aldermen to join Flores in the push for transparency.  Otherwise, the cost of the parking meter deal will look like chump change.