A visualization of the existing street grid at the Reese site (left) and the city’s planned reconfiguration [Department of Planning and Development]

Developers and city planners will avoid dipping into millions in available tax-increment financing for a projected $60 million public infrastructure overhaul planned for the site of the “Bronzeville Lakefront” campus, city officials confirmed on Tuesday.

Leaders of the city’s Department of Planning and Development and the GRIT development team detailed their budding financial arrangement during a meeting of the Community Development Commission, which voted on Tuesday to allow the city to sell a 48-acre slice of the former Michael Reese Hospital site to GRIT.

Ethics officials have been fielding questions “for years” over whether aldermen can serve on nonprofit boards. The answer is complicated. [Colin Boyle/ Block Club Chicago]

Chicago ethics rules don’t preclude aldermen from serving as unpaid board members for organizations based in their own wards. But they would face such onerous restrictions in the role that the side-gig may not be worth it, a city ethics arbiter pronounced this week.

A rendering of the 48-acre parcel set for sale to a private development team for the $4 billion “Bronzeville Lakefront” project

The $4 billion “Bronzeville Lakefront” megadevelopment is set to clear a critical hurdle on Tuesday as a Chicago commission moves to sell a 48-acre swath of public land to a private development venture for $96.9 million.

The city’s Community Development Commission is set to virtually convene at 1 p.m. Tuesday to consider four sales of city-owned land, including the sale of part of the property on the city’s Near South lakefront that was occupied for decades by Michael Reese Hospital.

Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10) and Ald. Raymond Lopez (15) introduced a resolution calling for a hearing on resources for employers and workers.

Aldermen are set to hear from workforce and employment experts Tuesday about resources available to employers, workers and trade and labor organizations as Chicago continues reopening. 

The City Council Committee on Workforce Development is scheduled to convene at 10 a.m. for a subject matter hearing spurred by a resolution (R2021-445) introduced by Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza (10), who chairs the workforce development committee, and Ald. Raymond Lopez (15).

City attorneys have been charged with collecting an overdue ethics violation fine from Ald. Carrie Austin (34). State officials will set up vaccination clinics in downtown office buildings. Mayor Lori Lightfoot cut the ribbon on a long-awaited bike infrastructure project. And Lightfoot pinned federal regulators’ concerns over a Southeast Side metal shredding in part on the lax permitting practices of “the previous administration” in Washington.

A bust of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable stands in Pioneer Court along Michigan Avenue, The DuSable Museum of African American History is located in Washington Park, Honorary Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable Way in Washington Park [Erin Hegarty]

A City Council committee unanimously endorsed a proposal to rename outer Lake Shore Drive after Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable in April, teeing up a vote on the council floor this month. But the 18-month push to get the ordinance out of committee is not the first effort in the past few decades to recognize the city’s founder.

County leaders are mostly backing a bill they say would make it easier for local governments to demolish or rehab abandoned buildings. [Eric Allix Rogers on Flickr]

Cook County leaders are championing a bill in Springfield they say will prevent delinquent properties from falling into a spiral of blight. But one county office says much more is needed to fix the government’s handling of abandoned buildings, arguing that “a BAND-AID won’t cure cancer.”

A bill to give voters a say in the governance of Chicago Public Schools will likely land on Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk by the end of the legislative session. But will the bill mandate a fully elected school board or a "hybrid" elected-appointed body to oversee the nation’s third-largest school district? The Daily Line reporter Caroline Kubzansky talked to State Sen. Robert Martwick (D-Chicago), who has been championing elected school board legislation since 2015, and Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford (D-Maywood), who’s carrying Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s hybrid proposal in the legislature.

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Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chief Financial Officer Jennie Huang Bennett in conversation Thursday

Mayor Lori Lightfoot laid out for city investors on Thursday how she tackled the $1.2 billion budget gap for 2021 and described her priorities for spending the $1.9 billion city officials anticipate Chicago will receive from the federal American Rescue Plan.

City leaders hosted the daylong Chicago Virtual Investors Conference Thursday via Zoom for more than 375 attendees, including real estate investors, according to an introduction from the city’s Chief Financial Officer Jennie Huang Bennett. 

Maps showing the concentration of gun and drug warrant executions on homes between 2017 and 2020 [Chicago Office of the Inspector General]

The Chicago Police Department has registered a nosedive in the number of raids it’s executed on homes during the past two years, as police leaders have repeatedly tightened department policies to rein in warrant executions. But the shift is moving so fast that the department’s existing systems can’t tell whether the new rules are having any effect, a city watchdog wrote in a report published Thursday.

Then-Ald. Dick Mell (33) promoting the Keep Chicago Renting Ordinance in 2013, with future 1^st Ward Ald. Daniel La Spata behind him [Erin Hegarty]

An Illinois appellate court has overturned a landmark 2013 Chicago ordinance designed to protect renters whose buildings are foreclosed upon, portending a potential wave of evictions just as pandemic-related safeguards are set to expire.

City leaders rolled out a slate of outdoor summer events. The head of the city’s police oversight agency is out. Mayor Lori Lightfoot blasted a City Council proposal to rein in police raids. And a top city watchdog illustrated what she called the Chicago Police Department’s “tangled and convoluted” disciplinary procedures.

From left: Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25), Ald. Daniel La Spata (1), Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33), Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20) and Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35) [Chicago Democratic Socialist Caucus]

Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35) welcomed an outpouring of support from some activists and organizers after he and four of his colleagues announced they were chartering the City Council’s Democratic Socialist Caucus on Saturday.

But others were confused, he said.

“Some people were like, ‘I thought you already had a caucus — what’s the big deal?’” Ramirez-Rosa said.

Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25) and Jitu Brown, national director of Journey for Justice, during the subject matter hearing Tuesday.

Expanding job opportunities and widening community resources for kids and young adults could help quell violence in the city this summer following a gun violence spike amid the COVID-19 pandemic, officials and advocates told aldermen on Tuesday.

More than a dozen witnesses  from neighborhood associations, justice advocacy groups, city departments, the mayor’s office and officials from the Chicago Police Department and the Park District described an array of strategies to help stymie violence in the city during Tuesday’s joint meeting of the City Council Committee on Health and Human Relations and Committee on Public Safety.

 

 

Chicago Department of Public Health Comm. Allison Arwady addresses aldermen Monday.

Chicagoans can look forward to the time-held tradition of residential block parties again this summer while city health officials plan to shift vaccination efforts to a more neighborhood-based effort during the coming months.

"I fully expect that block parties will be back this summer," Chicago Department of Public Health Comm. Allison Arwady told aldermen Monday, though she said the popular neighborhood events will likely come back "more in the sort of middle of the summer and on."