The daughter of disgraced former Chicago Ald. Danny Solis has resigned from a high-ranking post at the Chicago Park District, weeks after WBEZ revealed an internal investigation that accused her of violating the agency’s sexual harassment policy.
Despite her father’s dramatic political downfall, Maya Solis had continued in her $126,072-a-year post as one of three region directors for the Park District.
But a spokeswoman for the Park District told WBEZ that Maya Solis resigned as south region director effective Wednesday.
Park District officials declined further comment on the resignation. And Maya Solis did not return messages Wednesday.
In September, WBEZ reported on the investigation that found Maya Solis had learned about a sexual harassment allegation in 2018 and did not report it to the human resources department.
The Park District’s inspector general recommended earlier this year that administrators take “appropriate disciplinary action” against Solis. And the top HR official for the agency sent Solis a memo in April citing her “direct violation of the Chicago Park District’s sexual-harassment policy.”
But the memo also shows Solis received only “verbal counseling” and an order to take three training sessions about harassment and “workplace conflict.”
Since then, the female employee who says she was sexually harassed filed a complaint against the park district with the city’s Commission on Human Relations. The employee alleges she told Solis about her problem “on numerous occasions” before she went to the inspector general’s office last year, and she complained that the Park District did not further discipline Solis, according to documents obtained through an open-records request.
The Park District has urged the Human Relations Commission to dismiss the complaint.
Solis’s father was a top ally of former Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel and one of the most prominent Hispanic politicians in Chicago.
But Danny Solis began cooperating with federal investigators in 2016, when confronted with evidence of his own wrongdoing, according to court documents.
He retired from the City Council in 2019, after the Chicago Sun-Times reported he was secretly recording conversations with two other allegedly corrupt top Illinois politicians: then-Ald. Edward Burke and longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, both Democrats from Chicago’s South Side.
Solis has been charged with bribery but under his “deferred prosecution agreement” with the feds, he can avoid being convicted and going to prison.
In a profile of Danny Solis in the Sun-Times this week, Maya Solis described the difficult conversation the longtime politician had with his family after the public disclosure of embarrassing accusations against him.
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team.
