Aldermen alternated between pleading for additional inspectors and thanking the leadership of the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection (BACP) for their assistance, as a supermajority of Council members attended the the budget hearing for one of the city agencies they interact with most. Commissioner Maria Guerra Lapacek, now in her third year, heard few challenging comments from aldermen, as they called for adding vice inspectors in evenings and weekends and gently enquired about planning for the new city Airbnb licensing program set to begin December 15.

The Cook County health system’s $1.8 billion budget was Tuesday’s final hearing, and one of the longest. While the county plans to allocate just $111 million in taxpayer dollars to the system, a 77% reduction since 2009, public health remains one of the county’s biggest responsibilities, alongside public safety. Cook County Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS) CEO Dr. Jay Shannon read from a nine page statement, outlining the challenges facing the county’s health network, including competition from other hospitals, changing patient needs, and aging facilities.

Cook County Transportation and Highways Superintendent John Yonan won praise from commissioners during his first of two planned hearings this week, in which he detailed his plan to allocate $500,000 to each commissioner for local infrastructure projects, intended to leverage federal dollars for larger scale projects guided by the department. Another added, unspoken benefit: currying favor with local mayors, managers, and aldermen by bringing what commissioners joked was, and wasn’t, “pork”.  

What promised to be an already lengthy hearing into the Department of Animal Care and Control went much longer when a group of about a dozen veterans interrupted the hearing, demanding to know why the Veterans Affairs Commission didn’t have a bigger budget, and why it had been moved under a different department.

Cook County’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar defended her department’s plans to lay off 18 employees in the county’s toxicology lab at Tuesday’s morning hearing, which she argued would save more than $1 million on salaries, equipment, and testing costs, while also maintaining one of the county’s coveted accreditations. The department’s proposed budget for 2017 is $13.6 million.

Aldermen spent a majority of the Police Board’s budget hearing late Tuesday afternoon questioning Board President Lori Lightfoot how the new police oversight systems will impact her board’s work. The Police Board reviews disciplinary requests and recommends action against officers accused of serious misconduct.

With the presidential election three weeks away and early voting underway since September 29, the Board of Elections Commissioners spent their testimony updating aldermen on registration numbers and planned voter information campaigns at their roughly 40 minute hearing Tuesday. And it was not without some sarcasm regarding Chicago’s history of voter fraud and questions about one presidential candidate's claim of this year's “rigged election.”

Modernization of the city’s outdated 311 system will include a cloud based software that’ll automatically update regularly like a cell phone operating system, Department of Innovation and Technology Commissioner Brenna Berman told aldermen Tuesday.

Commissioners got a broad overview of Cook County’s finances and spending plans in the first day of two weeks of budget hearings Monday morning. County Chief Financial Officer Ivan Samstein led testimony for the Bureau of Finance for nearly four hours, outlining the county’s $4.4 billion budget, getting into the minutiae of President Preckwinkle’s proposed sweetened beverage tax, and into a minor tiff with Comm. Bridget Gainer (D-10) over tax collection.  

Cook County Highways and Transportation Commissioner John Yonan will testify about his department’s budget Tuesday morning, including some details about a new initiative that would give each commissioner $500,000 to contribute to capital projects like roads, bridges, and pedestrian and bike-friendly fixes in each district. While the program sounds similar to Chicago’s menu program program (which gives each alderman about $1.3 million to spend on infrastructure projects like speed bumps, play lots, and street lighting from a pre-approved list), Yonan, a 19-year veteran of the Chicago Department of Transportation, says this program could be leveraged to do much more.

Chicagoans seem to have a propensity for voting this electoral season, with 14,376 votes cast through Monday evening at the two Loop voting locations since the first opened on September 29, according to data provided by the Chicago Board of Elections. Meanwhile, suburban voters, with polls at a Loop location and four suburban courthouses, are lagging far behind, with only 3,108 votes cast during the same time period, according to data provided by the Cook County Clerk.

With no major taxes or fees proposed, and lacking a threat of one of the city’s pension funds becoming insolvent, the first hearing on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s FY 2017 budget was fairly uneventful compared to past years. At Monday’s day long hearing, aldermen asked a grab bag of questions of City Budget Director Alex Holt, Comptroller Erin Keane, and Chief Financial Officer Carole Brown. Frequent topics included the new Community Catalyst Fund, two new pilot programs to ease car congestion downtown and at Wrigley Field, and the Chicago Police Department’s hiring plans.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ambitious plan to add 970 new positions within the Chicago Police Department by 2018 is a complicated numbers game, making it difficult to quantify exactly the net number of new police officers who will join the force over the next two years.

Chicago public school kids (and many parents) went to bed Monday not knowing whether their teachers would strike. It took some down to the wire negotiating and a helping hand from the city’s tax-increment-financing (TIF) districts to reach a deal. But as we discuss in this week’s show, we still don’t know the full cost of the agreement, or how this contract impacts other looming issues at CPS–namely, a pension shortfall and statewide funding fix that hasn’t come through from the Illinois General Assembly.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle rolled out her $4.4 billion FY2017 budget in a brief 27 minute Thursday morning address. The budget includes a one-cent per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, a net decrease in 211 positions across county government, and a pledge to not raise taxes again for at least the next two fiscal years.