Last year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle teamed up to find ways to reduce and reform government. A top-down review found different agencies were running employment programs. It was redundancy gone wild: Three different offices, staffs, copy machines, phone systems and governing boards. No one was coordinating the region’s efforts to match the right jobs with the right employers.

Now, it’s all under one roof.

“So our focus is on ensuring not only that we are efficient in the way that we are spending the dollars, but also emphasizing placement above all because that is the only way we make a dent in the unemployment rate,” Norington-Reaves said.

Out of the box, the merger already has saved $2.2 million, reduced staff positions from 90 to 60, and captured a $3 million federal work-force innovation grant, she added. She will report to Preckwinkle, Emanuel and a 28-member board that includes civic and business pros such as co-chairs Larry J. Goodman, CEO of Rush University Medical Center, and Frank Clark, the recently retired ComEd CEO and chairman.

“Training for training’s sake does not make a dent in the unemployment rate,” Norington-Reaves argued. “We have got to train for the jobs that are in demand so that we’re bridging that gap.”

There’s plenty to bridge right in the bureau­cracy’s backyard.

At the county’s criminal courthouse at 26th and California, some staff are still using carbon paper to process paperwork, I’m told.

People are pushing carts loaded with paper in duplicate and triplicate.

“We have people who don’t know how to use computers that we could have been putting through a training program so that they could avoid being laid off,” Norington-Reaves said.

Another thing she’s excited about: After our meeting, she was headed to her first tae kwon do class. The martial arts sound like great preparation for mastering bureaucracy.