Jeff Brink and Malcolm Whiteside during Monday’s finance committee meeting.

A proposal to establish an Urban Forestry Advisory Board stalled in committee Monday, as aldermen approved more than $1 million in legal settlements.

Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38) asked county commissioners not to rename Oct. 12 to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, arguing “this is about addition, not subtraction.”

Elected officials and public commenters raised different arguments for and against renaming Cook County’s Columbus Day holiday during a well-attended subject matter hearing Monday.

A rendering of a building planned at 920 S Wells as part of the “North Union” campus planned next to the Moody Bible Institute.

Aldermen are scheduled on Tuesday to give a zoning nod to JDL Development’s plan to spend the next decade building multiple towers with apartments and commercial space interspersed with parks on a 12-acre swath of the Near North Side.

Key sponsors of a police oversight ordinance include Ald. Harry Osterman (48), Ald. Leslie Hairston (5), Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35) and Ald. Roderick Sawyer (6).

A key committee vote on civilian oversight of the Chicago Police Department will be taken next month, teeing up a possible vote by the full City Council June 23, Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29) told aldermen multiple times on Friday. 

Mayor Lori Lightfoot during an April 15 news conference and Inspector General Joseph Ferguson during a committee meeting the next day.

A months-long legislative battle over police transparency is set to come to a head Monday afternoon as aldermen vote whether to compile two decades’ worth of police misconduct complaints into a public database.

The Urban Forestry Advisory Board would be responsible for recommending policies to reverse the decline of the city’s tree canopy. [Facebook/Chicago Region Trees Initiative]

Aldermen are set on Monday to weigh a long-stalled proposal to establish an all-volunteer board that would advise Chicago leaders on how to reverse the decline of the city’s tree canopy.

Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough has been a “reluctant participant” in court-appointed hiring reforms, attorney Michael Shakman said.

Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough has been a “reluctant participant” in a federally mandated effort to insulate her office from clout-based hiring practices, according to veteran anti-patronage attorney Michael Shakman. Shakman also doubled down against Gov. JB Pritzker’s attempts to free the governor's office from a federal anti-patronage probe, saying his administration is “not there yet” on a series of mandated reforms.

In 1969, an idealistic young lawyer named Michael Shakman filed a lawsuit with the goal of breaking the stranglehold that the Democratic Organization of Cook County — the political “machine” run by Mayor Richard J. Daley — held on Chicago’s government and elections. More than a half-century later, Shakman isn’t finished yet. The Daily Line’s Alex Nitkin talked to Shakman about the history of the “Shakman decree,” how it’s transformed the way governments work in Illinois, why it’s so hard to root out Chicago’s decades-old legacy of patronage — and what it will take to end the 52-year-old federal legal case.

Listen Now! 

A proposed 120-unit affordable housing development faced blowback in the Chicago Plan Commission due to concerns about environmental racism. [Department of Planning and Development]

A divided Chicago Plan Commission voted on Thursday to allow a new affordable housing development about 650 feet from the McKinley Park MAT Asphalt plant, as multiple commissioners said they feared the move would perpetuate environmental racism against the developments future residents who are extremely likely to be Latino.

Chicago Department of Buildings Comm. Matthew Beaudet and Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local Union 130 president Jim Majerowicz came down on opposite sides of a debate over plumbing regulations on Thursday.

A procession of city buildings officials, developers and engineers championed a push on Thursday to relax Chicago’s plumbing regulations, saying a widely-used form of plastic piping can dramatically cut construction costs across the city. But an influential plumbers’ union is resisting the plan, saying the flammable material could “jeopardize safety” in the case of fires.

Advocates for the Empowering Communities for Public Safety ordinance rallied outside Ald. Taliaferro’s ward office Monday [Erin Hegarty]

Aldermen are set on Friday to discuss a years-in-the-making proposal to establish civilian oversight of the police department as Mayor Lori Lightfoot continues working on her own measure. 

Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36) explains his proposal to license tow truck operators.

A proposal to license towing companies to target “rogue” truck operators is headed to the City Council floor.

Members of the City Council Committee on License and Consumer Protection gave unanimous approval on Wednesday to the ordinance (SO2020-4817), which Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36) introduced in October and has tweaked multiple times since. The measure is lined up for final approval by the City Council next Wednesday.

 

 

An aerial view of the 12-acre "North Union" development planned on the Moody Bible Institute campus [Department of Planning and Development]

A decade-long plan to build more than 4,000 new homes along multiple blocks of the Near North Side (O2021-1024) will headline Thursday’s 10 a.m. meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission.

Cook County leaders will use preliminary census data to draw their 17 new district boundaries by the end of summer. Chicago will hire a full-time adviser on water policy thanks to new private grants. And a potential overhaul to the city’s plumbing code will be the topic of a zoning committee hearing Thursday afternoon.

 

 

A revised ordinance would compel the city to open a public database of closed police misconduct files going back to 2000. [Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago]

Updated May 19, 6:18 p.m.— Leaders of a Chicago watchdog agency on Wednesday tore into a curtailed version of a police transparency ordinance held up as a compromise between Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration and a pair of key aldermen. The series of substantial edits to the measure would "profoundly limit its transparency value," a spokesperson for Inspector General Joseph Ferguson wrote in a statement.