Supporters of the “People’s Coalition Map” held a news conference at City Hall in February. [Erin Hegarty/The Daily Line]

Chicago has yet to adopt a new ward map, as it’s tasked with doing every 10 years, but some aldermen are already looking ahead to change the remapping process ahead of the 2030 Census, from adjusting the number of votes needed to pass a map to taking the map drawing out of City Council’s hands completely.

Photo by Manuel Martinez, WBEZ / Treatment by Jason McGregor, Crain’s Chicago Business/iStock photo

Virtual public meetings and better systems of accountability have sharply boosted aldermanic attendance rates at City Council meetings since 2019, according to a joint analysis by The Daily Line, WBEZ and Crain’s Chicago Business. The average Chicago alderman showed up to do the work of the City Council about four out of every five times they were required to since the start of the term in May 2019.

WBEZ, Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line analyzed publicly available attendance records for 519 City Council meetings and committee meetings that occurred between May 2019 and December 2021 and found that Chicago aldermen attended an average of about 86% of the meetings required of them.

You can look up your alderman’s meeting attendance rate using our tool below.

Jason McGregor / Crain’s Chicago Business, and iStock photo

As COVID-19 cases have declined, Chicago’s downtown is beginning to transform from a pandemic ghost town into a bustling hub. And as more and more workers around the city face calls to return to the office, Chicago’s civic leaders are asking themselves: Can we really get more work done in person?

For much of the past two years, the City Council has met virtually, with aldermen implementing an historic new police oversight board, renaming DuSable Lake Shore Drive and passing a budget — all from the comfort of their homes, ward offices and even the dentist chair.

Jason McGregor / Crain’s Chicago Business, and iStock photo

Despite pressing issues surrounding education, racial equity and refugees facing Chicago in recent years, the staffed, six-figure City Council committees dedicated to those issues rarely meet, a Crain’s/The Daily Line/WBEZ joint analysis showed.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot reorganized some committees and created two new permanent committees — Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Contracting Equity and Oversight — expanding the number of standing committees to 19, up from 16 under the previous administration.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot speaks during a recent news conference.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has not yet announced whether she plans to run for re-election next year, but recent fundraising hauls show signs of a mighty campaign in the making. The first-term mayor brought in more than $700,000 in donations to her two campaign accounts since the beginning of the year, state board of elections records show.

Aldermen who support the “Chicago United Map” drawn under leadership of the rules committee during a March news conference. [Alex Nitkin / The Daily Line]

As the city’s contentious ward remap feud continues to simmer through a series of letters exchanged between two groups of aldermen who support competing ward maps, the alderman in charge of the process says she plans to look to Springfield to make passing future ward remaps easier. And as negotiations remain stalled, she says she has found the leader of the competing group to be “sexist” in his handling of the negotiating process.

Lanetta Haynes Turner, chief of staff to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, speaks during an event to announce the first allocations from the county’s Equity Fund.

A reset of the county’s grant distribution calculus, an “information exchange” for social service agencies, a resource center for disadvantaged pot purveyors and an intensive place-based economic development regime modeled on Chicago’s Invest South/West initiative will be among the first products of a new Cook County funding stream dedicated to reversing the effects of systemic racism, county officials announced Thursday.

Cook County Board of Review Comm. Larry Rogers (D-3), left, and Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi.

The Cook County Board of Commissioners is set to leap into the public battle between county Assessor Fritz Kaegi and the Board of Review to get to the bottom of a nagging delay in property tax assessments that could imperil property owners and taxing bodies alike in the coming months.

Chicago Chief Financial Officer Jennie Huang Bennett and Ald. Walter Burnett (27) speak during a Wednesday committee meeting.

Aldermen on Wednesday took several zaps at Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal to give away $150 gas cards and $50 public transit cards, laying another bump in the road for her plan to help Chicagoans deal with rising fuel costs. The plan did not advance on Wednesday, putting its implementation in flux.

Ald. Leslie Hairston (5), left, and Chicago Department of Public Health Comm. Allison Arwady during a City Council committee hearing on Wednesday

Chicago is about to mightily expand its on-the-ground efforts to stop gun violence before it starts thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars incoming from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, city public health and social service officials said Wednesday. But many aldermen remain skeptical of whether the money is headed into the right hands.

Chicago Department of Planning and Development Comm. Maurice Cox and Ald. Michael Scott (24) during a City Council committee meeting on Wednesday

City planning officials are using federal dollars to fuel a top-to-bottom environmental review of Chicago’s 10,000-plus publicly owned vacant lots in an effort to uncork a persistent bottleneck in the city’s vacant land rehabilitation efforts by the end of the year, they announced Wednesday.

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15) speaks during an event launching his 2023 mayoral campaign. [Erin Hegarty / The Daily Line]

Ald. Raymond Lopez (15), one of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s loudest critics on the City Council, on Wednesday officially announced he plans to run for mayor in 2023. During his official campaign launch at The Plant in Back of the Yard, Lopez said he plans to “focus on safety, rebuilding our economy and supporting our first responders and city employees that serve the taxpayers of the city of Chicago.”

A rendering of the Discover Call Center at 8560 S. Cottage Grove Ave. in Chatham. [City of Chicago]

Cook County commissioners are set on Thursday to green-light a tax incentive for a celebrated new banking call center in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood that was once the husk of a Target store that closed at the busy South Side intersection. The tax break — designed to give a boost to abandoned commercial properties — is set to save the property owner millions in potential real estate taxes as the call center ramps up during the next decade.

The class 7b tax incentive (22-2222) is one of seven local property tax breaks and dozens of other items set for final approval during the Board of Commissioners’ monthly meeting at 10 a.m. Thursday.

A $54 million allocation for a “vacant buildings rehabilitation program” envisioned under the Chicago Recovery Plan is one of multiple topics set for dissection by aldermen on Wednesday. [Eric Allix Rogers on Flickr]

Chicago aldermen will get a chance on Wednesday to grill city officials about how they plan to spend $316 million in federally sourced money to get ahead of a dreaded surge in summer crime and revive thousands of vacant or abandoned properties.