There is a small space, the size of a closet, behind City Council chambers, known as the copy room. It's where many Chicago alderpersons discuss city business behind closed doors.
Conway says it was two years ago when mayoral advisor Jason Lee took him into the room to offer the 34th Ward alderman a deal.
"The mayor's office tried to extort my vote in exchange for basic public safety services," Conway said.
Conway says he had been trying to get the city to help clean up a homeless encampment that he says had become an open air drug market and violent. Conway says Lee offered to clean up the encampment in exchange for Conway's vote on the real estate transfer tax.
"That was a basic public safety service that every ward should get and shouldn't be tied to legislative votes," Conway said.
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At the time, Lee argued the two were tied together because the money generated from the tax would be used for the homelessness problem. Conway took his complaint to Chicago's Inspector General.
"We were unable to reach an investigative conclusion on those underlying allegations because we couldn't gather all of the information to which the law entitles us because the subject wouldn't cooperate," Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said.
In report released Wednesday, Witzburg says, as a condition of employment, all City Hall employees must cooperate with her office. If not, she says, they must be terminated. Mayor Johnson refuses to fire Lee because the mayor's office claims Lee would only cooperate with an attorney present.
A statement reads in part, "There is no justification for imposing discipline on a staffer who has engaged in no wrongdoing and who merely asserted their right to counsel."
"We received outreach from a private attorney representing the subject only after we had already sent our report to the mayor's office recommending the employee be terminated," Witzburg said.
Witzburg says the report includes unrelated cases involving three other city employees who failed to cooperate with her office, and all were fired by their department heads.
The inspector general's report comes one day before Mayor Johnson will present his budget.
He will need help from all alders, friends and foes to close a $1.15 billion budget gap.