Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough’s first-year staffing initiatives did nothing to improve the function of her office’s five suburban locations, but they did make supervisors miserable — and that was the point, county employees testified in federal court on Tuesday.

Three years after a Chicago law regulating short-term rentals went into effect, aldermen will consider tightening the regulations on home-sharing platforms like Airbnb.

A group of Logan Square property owners including prolific Northwest Side landlord Mark Fishman want a judge to nullify the city’s support for a planned affordable housing development, writing in a lawsuit that replacing a surface parking lot with 100 subsidized apartments would cause them “irreparable injury.”

 As early voting in the March 17 presidential primary expanded to all 50 wards and the Cook County suburbs, election officials said in-person voting was off to a slow start — but requests for mail-in ballots surged 85 percent.

A representative of anti-patronage attorney Michael Shakman tipped his hat to Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi on Friday for making “positive progress” on a series of court-ordered hiring reforms, even though federal oversight is likely to continue for at least another year.

Jai Simpson, a member of a Chicago student environmental group called the Social Justice Institute, joined other activists in imploring Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reinstate the city’s department of environment. [Brett Chase/BGA]

More than two dozen Chicago young activists Friday called on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to reinstate a city department of environment to combat heavy pollution in black and Latino neighborhoods and increase efforts to fight climate change.

About 30 people, mostly students, rallied outside the mayor’s office on City Hall’s fifth floor. They urged Lightfoot to follow through on her campaign promise to reopen the environment department, which former Mayor Rahm Emanuel eliminated in 2012.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on Friday that she will not back an effort to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day as an official city holiday.

“I absolutely have no plans to support any elimination of Columbus Day at the city level,” Lightfoot said.

The Chicago Board of Education voted Wednesday to change the official holiday observed by schools on the second Monday of October from Columbus Day, honoring the Italian explorer, to Indigenous Peoples Day, to recognize that his arrival touched off a genocide of indigenous people.

Lightfoot said the schools had celebrated both holidays for a number of years, and that the change made sense.

However, the city will not be following suit, Lightfoot said at an unrelated event to announce new crime fighting measures for the Chicago Transit Authority.

Lightfoot said there was more the city could do to “elevate the history of indigenous people” in Chicago.

“They are a marginalized community,” Lightfoot said. “There is a lot more we can do to be aware and sensitive of the history.”

Two measures introduced by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33) [O2019-6976; O2019-5581] last year to change the holiday have yet to get a hearing — and now face a tough road to become law.

In 2016, the City Council passed a resolution [R2016-688] recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day, but that was only a ceremonial measure.

Chicagoans have called for Columbus Drive to be renamed and some have repeatedly vandalized a statue of Columbus.

Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38) said he was incensed by the decision by the Board of Education, whose members are appointed by Lightfoot.

The move amounts to “erasing history,” Sposato said, vowing to marshal an effort to reverse the decision.

“This isn’t the end of it,” Sposato said.

Columbus Day marks the contributions of Columbus, who claimed to have discovered America on Oct. 12, 1492 — even though it was already populated.

The Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans President Sergio Giangrande called the CPS decision “a slap in the face of the more than 500-thousand Italian Americans in Chicago.”

“The historical legacy of any individual is and should be subject to debate,” Giangrande said. “That debate should not give license to the wholesale removal of a symbol indemnity that was a beacon of hope for millions of maligned Italians who helped create the beauty of this country.”

When Lightfoot vowed in a speech on Feb. 14 to end poverty in Chicago within a generation, she called out past Chicago leaders for failing to atone for the crimes committed against the first residents of what would become Chicago.

“Here in Chicago, we must highlight and embrace the legacy of the Council of the Three Fires and teach our children about the United Nations of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Indians so that they know more than the story of Ft. Dearborn,” Lightfoot said.

In 2018, an effort by Alds. Sophia King (4) and Brendan Reilly (42) to rename Balbo Drive for Civil Rights icon and investigative reporter Ida B. Wells ignited a similar firestorm and was ultimately scrapped.

Italo Balbo, a marshal in the Italian Air Force Marshal, rose to fame after he made the first transatlantic crossing from Rome to Chicago. He also helped fascist dictator Benito Mussolini to power in 1922 and served as a high-ranking official in his air force.

The City Council voted unanimously to rename Congress Parkway for Wells a few months after the controversy, which prompted members of Chicago’s Italian American community to threaten to unseat Reilly. However, his 2019 bid for re-election was unopposed.

Block Club Chicago’s Kelly Bauer contributed to this report.

The only two Black female non-judicial candidates endorsed by the Cook County Democratic Party were left off of the voting “palm cards” distributed in House Speaker Mike Madigan’s (D-Chicago) 13th Ward, where he’s been committeeperson for more than 50 years.

 Cook County officials confirmed a new member on Thursday to the county’s Board of Ethics, pushing forward Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s shakeup of the watchdog group as its remaining members continue trying to advance a series changes to the county’s ethics rules.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot says the ultimate aim of her affordable housing policy is to “break up segregation in our city.” [Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago]

To hear Mayor Lori Lightfoot tell it, none of her administration’s efforts to tackle the intractable problems facing Chicago stands a chance of success unless dramatically more Chicagoans have a stable place to live.

A coalition of progressive groups that have been at odds with Mayor Lori Lightfoot since she took office laid out a six-point plan on Wednesday for the mayor to follow so she can meet her goal to end poverty in Chicago within a generation.

Members of the Cook County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday advanced a controversial effort to increase their authority over the county’s $2.8 billion health and hospital system, rebuffing members of the system’s independent health board who have warned the move could make it harder to find a new CEO.

Aldermen told city officials on Wednesday that they must do more to keep people from riding on sidewalks when scooters return to the streets of Chicago this summer as part of a second pilot program.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to prevent the Obama Presidential Center from pushing longtime Woodlawn residents out of their homes would earmark $4.5 million from the city’s affordable housing fund to combat displacement fueled by gentrification.

Aldermen will get their chance to weigh in on last summer’s test run of electric scooters, which city officials said ended with “mixed results.”