Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot’s transition team told aldermen Tuesday that she plans to issue an order upon taking office next week attempting to curtail their control over issuing permits and licenses in their wards, as she tries to deliver on a difficult campaign promise to rein in so-called aldermanic privilege.

Lightfoot apparently won’t try to do away with the controversial tradition of City Council members having enormous power on local zoning questions, according to aldermen who were briefed on her plan at Lightfoot’s River North transition office. And aldermen could still line up the votes to defeat many license proposals brought forward by city departments for approval under the Lightfoot plan.

Still, her executive order could diminish a major source of aldermen’s authority on matters such as where certain businesses can open in their wards.

While some council members said they were open to working with Lightfoot to implement the new rules, others said her proposed top-down approach won’t work in a city where such decisions require an intimate understanding of block-by-block realities.

Lightfoot transition officials talked to aldermen in groups about how she would deal with aldermanic privilege. She seems set to try to centralize the process of issuing permits for things such as business driveways and residential building projects, plus licenses for things like liquor sales and block parties. While those actions now take place at City Hall, they in practice need the local alderman’s support to make it through the City Council.

Lightfoot did not attend the briefings, according to aldermen, which in some cases increased their irritation that she hasn’t been communicating with them much since her April 2 election.

In a statement, Lightfoot said the order she’ll sign Monday will be the first step in ending aldermanic privilege. And following criticism from some council members, she said she will collaborate with aldermen on the process.

“I was pleased to hear that my team received wide ranging feedback from aldermen, which we will work to take into account to ensure a smooth implementation process,” Lightfoot said in the statement. “As we emphasized to aldermen today, aldermanic voice is critical, both in developing citywide policy and in making local decisions. But the days of aldermanic prerogative as an unchecked veto are over.”

Lightfoot has spoken at length about the executive order in recent weeks, without giving many specifics. In a Tuesday morning interview with WBBM-AM 780 political editor Craig Dellimore, she said she doesn’t want to stop aldermen from advocating for their wards. “But what will change is their ability to stop literally anything in their wards in their tracks unilaterally, without any oversight or any voice from anybody else,” Lightfoot said in the interview.

Southwest Side Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, said standardizing the license and permitting process could be a good place to start.

“For every item people come and see (City Hall) about, whether it’s a permit for building a house or a permit for opening a business, they’re automatically, ‘Go see your alderman.’ And that has to stop,” Cardenas said. “City Hall has to be accountable and has to have an easier process for folks, residents as well as businesses, to be able to take in the requests and process it in an expeditious way.”

Ald.-elect Daniel La Spata, 1st, came out of the briefing and said he still had questions about which processes specifically Lightfoot wants to take out of aldermen’s hands. “That’s the question that we’re still looking to answer,” La Spata said. “Honestly, we looked at a slideshow of all of four slides. And it did not really show a list of exactly what is going to be affected. So there’s a lot that we are learning, and we’re going to learn on Monday along with the rest of the general public.”

Aldermen long have informally administered such business, and they have repeatedly gotten in legal trouble over the years for taking bribes in exchange for permits or licenses. The practice was thrust into the spotlight when veteran Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, was charged by federal authorities in January with attempted extortion for allegedly leaning on Texas-based restaurateurs to hire his law firm in exchange for help with permits needed to renovate a Burger King in his Southwest Side ward. Burke has denied wrongdoing.

During her successful mayoral campaign, Lightfoot hammered on the Burke charge as evidence of the corruption of Chicago’s political machine, and said she would deal with aldermanic privilege as soon as she took office. It’s hard to legislate it out of existence, however, because privilege is mainly a tradition of City Council members acceding to the wishes of their colleagues on local matters.

Southwest Side Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, came out of the briefing skeptical about how this would work. “She defines (privilege) as the alderman’s power to initiate, block or delay action in our wards, which basically is our entire job description, which is what she wants to curtail,” he said.

“She said she’s going to instruct her departments on day one, ‘If you can proceed with anything without aldermanic approval, do it,’ ” Lopez said. “That could be anything from sidewalk cafes, public way use, block parties, driveways, loading zones, and special events in and around your ward. A number of us had concerns about that for safety reasons. Obviously there are things about our wards that we know best, particularly when it comes to block parties and parades and things of that nature.”

Many of those issues require City Council approval, so aldermen could still vote to deny a permit or license after a city department gives an initial approval. That could be a big problem for business owners who think they’re on the way to getting a key approval they need, only to find out later that the City Council has shot it down because the local alderman has concerns about the plan, Lopez said.

And he questioned why Lightfoot would pick this fight with aldermen when she will need their support for “much more pressing matters” such as Police Department reform. “You won’t have that leverage in the fights that are needed further down the road that are going to be of much more importance to the city of Chicago than whether or not an alderman has the right to make decisions in their ward.”