Mayor Lori Lightfoot in her City Hall office. [Madison Hopkins/BGA]

Nearly 30 years ago, Chicago’s mayor and Commonwealth Edison squared off in a high-stakes battle over how the public utility would operate the city’s power grid.

Then-Mayor Richard M. Daley was under intense pressure to extract concessions from the company, including assistance for the poor and elderly and assurances Chicago wouldn’t suffer major power outages. To try to get his way, the administration even publicly debated the city taking over the utility’s infrastructure.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is the best Democratic candidate to take on President Donald Trump and defend Chicago residents, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Friday, spurning Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Cook County Comm. Jeffrey Tobolski (D-16) announced on Friday that he will resign from the Cook County Board of Commissioners — five months after federal investigators raided his suburban office amid a growing corruption investigation.

“It is about time,” said Cicero Township Committeeperson Blanca Vargas, who controls approximately 21 percent of the vote on the committee that will be formed to pick Tobolski’s replacement.

Cresco senior counsel Jim Boland reviews the company's plan for a dispensary at 436 N Clark St. [Alex Nitkin/The Daily Line]

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Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42) excoriated the mayoral-appointed Zoning Board of Appeals as “a joke” on Friday after its members green-lit a proposal for a River North cannabis dispensary over his objections and those of a neighborhood group.

Jill Rose Quinn has racked up a powerful list of allies as high-ranking Democrats and LGBT organizing groups rally around her bid to become the first openly transgender judge ever to serve in Illinois.

But that doesn’t mean she’s stopped working for votes.

Leaders of five cannabis companies are due in City Hall on Friday to ask for permission to open what could be Chicago’s first new dispensaries since the sale of recreational weed became legal this year.

Supporters of a planned Emmett Street affordable housing complex say they aren’t worried about a lawsuit filed by a group of Logan Square property owners that aims to block the development.

The lawsuit, filed by prolific Northwest Side landlord Mark Fishman among others, takes aim at city leaders and the nonprofit Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, which plans to begin construction this year on a seven-story, all-affordable complex at 2602-38 N. Emmett St.

A law regulating short-term rentals must be strengthened to keep up with Chicago’s growing home-sharing industry and to prevent apartments and homes rented for a short time from creating a nuisance, city officials told aldermen Wednesday.

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.