LG Development's plan to build a 665-unit apartment complex near the intersection of Lake Street and Racine Avenue is set for zoning approval on Tuesday. [Department of Planning and Development]

Updated 8:21 a.m. Tuesday: A nearly $4 billion plan to build a 48-acre housing, office and life sciences campus on the former site of the Michael Reese Hospital was set to take another step forward on Tuesday as aldermen were scheduled to consider a zoning change for the project — until Ald. Sophia King (4) asked for a delay.

Second-installment 2020 tax bills are on track to be sent to property owners in early August.

Second-installment property taxes are on pace to be sent to Cook County property owners about a month behind schedule this year, county officials confirmed. And county Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s late start on reassessments this year could be putting the county on pace for an even later tax collection next year, prompting fears that the county’s tax offices could skid back into an old cycle of temporary budget holes for municipalities and school districts that rely on prompt tax revenues.

Chicago firefighters at the scene of a fire in Chicago in 2014. [Colin Boyle/Block Club]

A City Council committee is scheduled on Monday to consider approving a $1.83 million payment to settle a 2018 lawsuit brought by five female paramedics who alleged patterns of sexual harassment in the Chicago Fire Department. In multiple cases, the plaintiffs alleged they faced retaliation from superiors over their complaints while their abusers were promoted.

Chicago Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Comm. Rosa Escareño [left] and Ald. Brian Hopkins (2) during a committee meeting on Thursday

A City Council committee voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to advance a sweeping business deregulation package (O2021-2183) designed to speed the city’s pandemic recovery, setting up a major policy win for Mayor Lori Lightfoot over the objections of aldermen who fear one provision will usurp their ward-level authority.

Aldermen on the council’s Committee on License and Consumer Protection voted 15-3 to advance the 93-page “Chi Biz Strong” business relief package, teeing it up for final approval by the City Council next Wednesday. The ordinance’s 10 sections and dozens of subsections unspool or re-tool city rules around a wide range of businesses, including restaurants, taxis, and hotels. Also attached is a resolution supporting a future $10 million direct aid initiative and debt relief program for businesses.

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15) challenged the city’s timeline for upgrading its technology during a committee hearing on Wednesday.

Chicago leaders should spend at least $350 million during the next decade to update the city’s outdated apps, retrain and reshuffle its information technology staff and make a host of other tech improvements, a consultant told aldermen Wednesday after conducting a months-long study. The alternative would mean wasting increasing amounts of taxpayer money.

A-frame signs like this one in Andersonville would be formally legalized under a sweeping business relief ordinance set for consideration Thursday. [Alex Nitkin/The Daily Line]

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is hauling her 95-page hodgepodge of business deregulation proposals to a City Council committee on Thursday in a bet that the sweeping business relief package can overcome grumblings from some aldermen over its size and reach.

Lightfoot is scheduled to introduce an updated version of her “Chi Biz Strong” ordinance (O2021-2183) directly to the City Council Committee on License and Consumer Protection during its 10 a.m. meeting on Thursday. The direct introduction will allow the mayor to bypass Ald. Raymond Lopez’s (15) move to sidetrack the ordinance to the council’s Committee on Committees and Rules last month.

Ald. Jason Ervin (28) said during a Tuesday hearing that a new roller rink will “serve as a deterrent” to illegal drug trafficking on a busy West Garfield Park corridor.

City and state officials are hoping a new roller skating rink can succeed where hundreds of arrests have failed to break up an open-air drug market in one of the West Side’s busiest commercial districts.

The City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate voted unanimously during its meeting on Tuesday to let the Chicago Park District build a public roller rink on a 17,500-square-foot city-owned parking lot at 4004-12 W. Madison St., a strip Ald. Jason Ervin (28) called a “very challenged area” of West Garfield Park.

Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36) during the April 2021 city Council meeting [Ashlee Rezin-Garcia/Sun-Times/pool]

City leaders should reverse their 2019 decision to merge the city’s facilities and information technology departments if they want to get serious about upgrading the city’s tech infrastructure, a key alderman said on Tuesday.

“There needs to be a centralized clearing house for technology,” Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36), who chairs the City Council Committee on Economic, Capital and Technology Development, told The Daily Line on Tuesday. He said he plans to raise the issue as Chicago finance officials prepare the city’s 2022 budget.

Aldermen advanced a measure to expedite fire code enforcement at the city’s airports. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she supports making Juneteenth an official city holiday, and she once again called on state lawmakers to pause their push to create an elected Chicago school board. And the Cook County Democratic Party’s semi-annual slating session, usually a summer affair, will take place in August this year.

City transportation officials plan early next year to rebuild the Division Street bridges over the Chicago River North Branch and North Branch Canal. [danxoneil on Flickr] 

Aldermen are set on Tuesday to clear the way for a mile-long streetscape makeover on the Near North Side and a new publicly accessible roller rink in West Garfield Park, among other measures. 

The City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate is scheduled during its 10 a.m. meeting Tuesday to consider an ordinance (O2021-2179) pushing forward the city’s long-running plan to rebuild both bridges and widen a nearly mile-long stretch of Division Street between Larrabee Street and the Kennedy Expressway. 

Rep. Will Davis (D-Homewood) (left) and Rep. Michael Zalewski (D-Riverside) [Facebook]

A long-debated push by Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi to compel extra financial data from large property owners hit a wall in Springfield last month, as supporters failed to bridge their differences with a coalition of powerful business groups. 

But after a dizzying flurry of negotiations left both sides more embittered than ever, some key legislators say their patience for compromise is wearing thin. Following three consecutive failed attempts at pushing the bill to the finish line, House Revenue and Finance Committee chair Rep. Michael Zalewski (D-Riverside) said the opponents won’t be able to keep it bottled up forever.

Ald. Daniel La Spata (1) (left) and ComEd president Terry Donnelly during a hearing on Thursday

Chicago would be hard-pressed to find a new electric utility provider that can match the reliability, responsibility and affordability of Commonwealth Edison, leaders of the company argued during a three-hour hearing on Thursday.

But the company needs to step up its commitments if it wants to keep its monopoly over the city’s electric grid, aldermen said.

More than a dozen top executives from ComEd are expected to be on hand for a subject matter hearing set to discuss the company’s relationship with Chicago on Thursday. [Facebook/ComEd]

Representatives of Commonwealth Edison are set to withstand a grilling from aldermen during a wide-ranging hearing on Thursday as the utility giant vies to remain the city’s sole provider of electricity.

The City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy is scheduled to host a subject matter at 10 a.m. Thursday to discuss ComEd’s “annual franchise report” and the company’s “summer preparedness” plans. The franchise report has not been publicly released.

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi appears on track to break free of a 12-year-old federal monitor, spurring allegations from Clerk Karen Yarbrough’s office of preferential treatment.

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office could be on track to shake loose a federal hiring monitor that’s dogged the office for nearly a decade, a potential breakthrough that could give Kaegi a boost ahead of a grueling reelection campaign. 

But a separate monitor spurred by attorney Michael Shakman’s 52-year-old anti-patronage lawsuit shows no signs of leaving county Clark Karen Yarbrough’s office, which came under the shadow of federal oversight last year. And a senior official in Yarbrough’s office is calling the purpose of the Shakman probe into question, saying the lawsuit has created a “cottage industry” for lawyers to squeeze money from county taxpayers. 

Two tax-increment financing districts are being lined up for extensions as dozens of others are on track to expire. And aldermen on Wednesday will consider launching a new city phone app.

Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin speaks during her “State of the Chicago Treasurer’s Office” address on Monday.

Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin wants to widen the city’s investment pool to include an array of smaller-community-based banks as part of an effort to juice loans in neighborhoods that have been overlooked by national banks, she said Monday. 

Making it easier for small banks to hold city assets is one outcome Conyears-Ervin hopes to draw from a forthcoming “municipal depositories task force,” she told The Daily Line in advance of a “State of the Chicago Treasurer’s Office” address Monday morning. The treasurer earlier this year said the task force, which would include Comptroller Reshma Sonni and members of the City Council, could devise strategies to upend entrenched patterns of systemic racism in the baking industry. 

From left: Ald. Howard Brookins (21), Chicago Department of Transportation Comm. Gia Biagi and Ald. Michele Smith (43) during a hearing on e-scooters on Thursday

Representatives of e-scooter companies argued on Thursday that a permanent citywide scooter program would ease car traffic, reduce pollution, open new transit options and add a much-needed new stream of revenue for the city. 

But many aldermen aren’t so sure. 

Members of the Chicago Health Equity Coalition, including Jitu Brown, gathered outside City Hall last month to make demands of Mercy Hospital’s new owner.

The new operator of Mercy Hospital has signed onto covenants that appear to meet some of the demands of a coalition pushing to keep the Bronzeville hospital open for the foreseeable future, but community members remain concerned about the transparency and equity of the deal.

CTA president Dorval Carter, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Sen. Dick Durbin and Rep. Mike Quigley participate in a ceremonial groundbreaking for the second phase of the Red Purple Modernization project [Alex Nitkin/The Daily Line]

Chicago’s Far South Side is likely still about a decade and $1 billion in secured funding away from being able to claim a piece of the CTA Red Line, but state lawmakers brought the vision a step closer to reality this week, just as a similarly massive overhaul of the Red Line’s north branch takes a critical step forward.  

The Illinois General Assembly sent Gov. JB Pritzker a bill (SB1822) on Monday that would give Chicago leaders more legal leeway to establish a tax-increment financing district around the 5.6-mile path of new Red Line track planned between 95th and 130th streets. The city in 2016 created a similar “transit TIF” to open up funding for the $2.1 million Red Purple Modernization project now underway on the North Side.

Ordinances in the City Council Rules Committee remain stuck for the time being. Aldermen will participate in a hearing on e-scooters on Thursday. Mayor Lori Lightfoot enlisted a “working group” to reduce carbon emissions from buildings. And the Chicago Cultural Center reopened.