Happy Saturday!

Earlier this week I drove to Springfield. What I did there was less important than what I experienced: Warm air, sunny skies and the unmistakable smell of late spring, early summer. Birds tweeted, and the scent of lilacs served to remind me that we’re heading into the time of year when living in the Midwest is pretty great.

So if you’re going to be in Chicago this weekend, make sure you take a walk, ride a bike, or maybe set up a radio outside and barbecue. Talk about baseball or nothing at all important so you can absorb the greatness of living in this place we call home. Because for the next five months, it is the best city in the world.

1. Mayor Shuffles His Leadership Team

Maybe Fridays are a good day for announcing personnel changes, since it gives everyone the weekend to settle down with the changes.. So, Mayor Rahm Emanuel teed up a few people for new offices.

• Randy Conner is the new Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management, replacing Barrett Murphy, whom the Sun-Times reports was fired because he tolerated a culture of racism.


• Samantha Fields is the new Budget Director, replacing Alexandra Holt, a 20-year veteran of City Hall..


• Rosa Escareno is the new Commissioner of BACP, replacing Samantha Fields. Escareno was Deputy Chief Operating Officer, working for COO Joe Deal.

The mayor also announced four-year reappointments for Inspector General Joe Ferguson and Chief Procurement Officer Jamie L. Rhee.

It’s important to note that with all of the leadership changes among mayor staff over the last two years, it’s almost entirely internal promotions, with very few hires from outside–never mind recruits from outside Chicago. Yes, we can homegrow good people here, but now and then, shouldn’t we expect an inspired person that wants to work in city government for a change?

2. However Much CPS Owes, They Don’t Have It

No matter how you look at it, funding for Chicago Public Schools is a complete disaster. Yes, CPS has been running a structural deficit and cooking the books for years to cover it up (my favorite move, using 14 months of revenue to pay for 12 months of operations in 2014), but those problems have been magnified many times over by state government’s total gridlock.

As you’ve read here before, CPS was counting on a $215 million bailout package passed through the state legislature in October with a bi-partisan vote. But, surprising everyone, Gov. Bruce Rauner vetoed the spending. In response, CPS laid administrators off and made $104 million in mid-year cuts. It still wasn’t enough to fill the gap.

Aldermen, anticipating they’ll be asked to bailout CPS with city money (CPS and the City of Chicago are two separate units of government), started agitating for specific details on how much CPS owes and when.

In response, city CFO Carole Brown announced Wednesday afternoon that the state is late in making $467 million in grant payments.

Wait, what? How much?

We checked with the Illinois State Board of Education, and yes, it seems that the state is late on a pretty big bill.

Most of what CPS needs to come up with is for a $720 million pension payment due June 30. So how will it pay the difference?

Brown wasn’t saying on Wednesday and no other plans have been released since, but budget officials anticipate a resolution in the coming weeks.

One more thing: As soon as CPS figures out how to pay that big bill on June 30, they have a close to $1 billion structural deficit they’ll have to work out for the 2017-18 school year.

3. North Branch Developers Rev Their Engines

There isn’t a more anticipated development gold rush than the North Branch Industrial Corridor. Wedged between North Center, Lincoln Park, West Town and Wicker Park along the Chicago River’s North Branch, the area was designated one of Chicago’s first Planned Manufacturing Districts in the late 1980’s. As a PMD, the area could only be used for manufacturing purposes, keeping land values down. But, as the neighborhoods around it became tonier, the number of manufacturing jobs in North Branch fell.

This week, the Department of Planning and Development recognized those realities by releasing an ambitious draft framework that attempts to ensure the area will remain home to some jobs, while giving developers plenty of red meat.

[Listen to DPD Commissioner David Reifman talk about some of what’s to come at our March Event.]

The framework limits residential development to only 50% of the area, while planning for interesting ideas like a new riverwalk, a north-south transitway limited to bikes and public transit, extending the 606 walk across the river and adding new “smart” traffic signaling.

The changes announced are likely only the beginning of many changes for Chicago’s 26 industrial corridors. Last April Mayor Emanuel announced plans to reevaluate every industrial corridor and all 14 of the city’s PMDs.

The biggest winners in this PMD do-over by far are developers, especially Sterling Bay, which snapped up the old Finkl Steel site on Armitage, and Tribune Media, which owns the huge Freedom Center printing plant at Chicago Ave. and the river. Tribune Media has been seeking a developer partner. With the new proposed DS zoning, Tribune will be greenlighted to build a series of new residential towers.

Remember the old Illinois Central air rights area? That’s now called the New East Side, with over 15,000 new residents over the last 15 years and the 93-story Wanda Vista tower is under construction.

Expect North Branch to be as transformative as that.

This week, The Daily Line’s publisher, Mike Fourcher, sits down with Kevin Graham, newly elected president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents all rank and file officers at the Chicago Police Department. Intense and highly politicized negotiations over the FOP’s contract are expected to begin soon. In one of his broadest interviews since taking office, Graham touched on a number of hot-button issues in policing: racism on the force, the Laquan McDonald investigation, trust in police, and some of his priorities going into negotiations.

For the second year in a row, Chicago Public Schools has found itself in the direst of financial positions. Having built a budget on expectations of state funding and then spending a year blaming Springfield, CPS is once again faced with with the challenge of finding enough cash to make its annual pension payment while keeping schools open. When the clock ran out last year and the pension bill came due on June 30th, CPS was forced to borrow $200 million from banks.

It took a minor delay, a recusal, hours of public testimony, and some added conditions for a planned composting facility in the 9th District to pass Board muster Wednesday. Commissioners moved quickly throughout the rest of the day’s business, including a $380,000 payout to a woman who alleged she was sexually assaulted while detained at the Cook County Jail, and payments and new oversight for the Department of Homeland Security.

A report issued by the Chicago Inspector General Tuesday reprimanded the city Board of Ethics for lax efforts to identify and keep records of all active lobbyists, making it harder to levy fines for lack of disclosure. The report called for the BOE to issue higher fines to those who fail to properly disclose lobbying activity. The report comes as a follow-up to a scathing March 2016 report, charging that the BOE only relies on public complaints, rather than its own recordkeeping.

That sound you hear are the shouts of joy from thousands of developers, contractors and assorted land use professionals as every last square inch of the North Branch Corridor is prepared for alteration, following Monday night’s release of the Draft North Branch Industrial Corridor Plan. While the plan for the strip along the Chicago River North Branch includes the name “industrial”, the result will be a lotless industrial than it is today, as the 125 page framework calls for converting much of the current Planned Manufacturing District zoning to residential, commercial and open park space.

Wednesday’s Cook County Board meeting promises to be dominated by talk of a proposed compost facility in the 9th District, where the presiding commissioner, citing conflict, has recused himself from proceedings and quit his side law job over a proposed composting facility. About 40 people have signed up to testify on the item, which is on the agenda in the normally uneventful zoning committee.

Commissioners are also being asked to approve payments for the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. DHSEM, which is in the middle of an overhaul, misspent more than $1 million without getting prior approval, and has lost its executive director. A code change to put the department under oversight of the Bureau of Administration and give the board more oversight of memoranda of understanding is one of the new agenda items. President Preckwinkle has also introduced a new member for the board that oversees the county’s health and hospitals system: Bob Reiter, a public face of the Chicago Federation of Labor.

Chicago’s Chief Financial Officer Carole Brown told reporters that the city is working to close a $100 million budget gap for Chicago Public Schools and to devise a long-term solution to address the school’s structural operating deficit by June 30th, the end of the district's fiscal year. In addition, the city is still waiting on $596 million in delayed block grants from the state. But for now, it appears the city's only stated plan is to “hope” the state will come through with a funding bill before then.

Proponents of a controversial zoning change in Jefferson Park that’s stirred up an unprecedented amount of debate in the neighborhood used Tuesday's Zoning Committee meeting to stage a protest.

It was a double header for advocacy on Monday, as Cook County Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS) CEO Dr. Jay Shannon and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle used a morning press conference and an afternoon City Club speech to drive home the potential negative impact of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) on uncompensated care costs and the “shameless act of political cowardice” on the part of Congressmen–including Illinois Republicans–to vote for it last week. 

Commissioners have a straightforward agenda at the County Board today, with a morning of consent calendar items followed by two routine committee meetings. The Technology Committee will consider a $17 million contract extension, and the Litigation Subcommittee will meet in executive session for updates on several pending lawsuits against the county.

Proposals to build a 27-story, 250-unit residential building in Hyde Park and to replace a gas station at the corner of North and Ashland Avenues in Wicker Park with an eight story hotel are on tap for today’s Zoning Committee meeting.

One item that’d allow for an upzone of a warehouse building near the Jefferson Park Transit Station is noticeably missing from the agenda–it’s an application that’s been the subject of hours of testimony at two separate zoning meetings–one held by the Plan Commission in February, the other by the Zoning Committee in March.

Mid-afternoon Monday, calls and emails went out from the mayor’s office to aldermen: There will be no briefings this week on how the city plans to bail out Chicago Public Schools to prevent the district from ending the school year three weeks early on May 30.

The collective bargaining agreement between the city and the union representing the rank and file officers of the Chicago Police Department is one of the most expensive and politically fraught contracts a mayor can encounter. Typically a three year agreement, the contract between the city and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 (FOP), representing the rank and file officers of the Chicago Police Department, costs the city hundreds of millions of dollars a year in salaries to the city’s more than 11,000 police officers. And, since those officers are required to live in the city boundaries, they and their family members’ happiness with the contract has a direct impact on the mayoral election.

Happy Saturday!

Friday morning I sat down with Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey for an extensive interview. We touched on a lot of issues, but there’s five biggies that came out.

1. He Thinks CPS CEO Forrest Claypool Is A “Disaster” But Says He Doesn’t Think He’s Working Hand-In-Glove With Mayor Emanuel

“I think Forrest Claypool deserves no credit. He has been a disaster. And I mean that in all seriousness. Forrest doesn’t know much about schools at all. I think he shows it in many, many ways,” said Sharkey. But when I pressed him on whether or not he and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (who have worked together since the early 1980’s) are planning out the politics of schools, he demurred.

“I think that Forrest Claypool is out of sync,” with the Mayor, said Sharkey. That said, the Mayor has done little, in Sharkey’s mind, to improve his grade from the “F” CTU gave him starting in 2011. But asked a number of ways, he seemed unwilling to unload on Emanuel like he does on Claypool.

2. He Thinks It’s Pointless To Seek State Money Until Local Revenues For Schools Are Increased First

CTU and CPS have a common cause when it comes to getting additional funding from the state, but Sharkey believes CTU should not work with CPS until Mayor Emanuel (and the city’s wealthy) commits to higher city funding first.

I asked Sharkey this question three different ways: Shouldn’t you be working together to get more state funding for Chicago schools? He refused to say CTU would work with CPS in Springfield until, “the Mayor and the city fathers of Chicago... commit to raising half a billion dollars for the schools in the city to keep the schools from going off a cliff.”

3. CPS’ Constant State of Crisis Is Damaging Confidence In Chicago Schools

Sharkey believes CPS’ continued fiscal woes are eroding the district’s brand, making CPS less attractive to parents, regardless of whatever improvements in test scores or graduation rates are being made. He lays this at the feet of Claypool in particular, since every few months Claypool announces a new financial emergency, leading Chicagoans to constantly wonder how long long the schools have until they collapse. “We’re at an inflection point now,” he says. “It’s produced a crisis of confidence. We’re seeing a trickle of people leaving the system, turning into a stream and now we worry about a flood.”

4. Despite The Financial Problems, Sharkey Thinks CPS Is Improving

“There’s plenty to be proud about with public schools,” he says. “Virtually every teacher I know has their kids in public schools. And that’s something. If you went back 30 years ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.”

Part of the problem in CPS and CTU’s relationship is that the union doesn’t give CPS enough credit when it’s doing things right, he said. “Graduation rates are up. When I first started teaching in Chicago in ‘98, we used to pull our hair about why the freshman class had 800 students in it, why the senior class had 200 students in it. Literally you had that kind of drop-off in a lot our big schools. We know a lot more about that now, we’re a lot better at getting students to complete.”

5. He Really Loves The Idea of An Elected School Board

“You gotta have some democracy there,” he says. He believes that the current school board, which is controlled and named by the Mayor, is disconnected from citizens.

And even though most Chicagoans–those without kids or who have aged out of caring about schools–would likely not pay attention to the school board, there are enough parents in Chicago that would participate, he thinks. “The people who are active in local school councils are the ones who go for report card pick up and are active in the elections. You have high participation in terms of the ones who are in and out of the schools,” and that’s enough he says.

There’s a role for aldermen, too. “Right now, the people who get the phone calls about, ‘there’s a problem in my school…’ are aldermen, and yet those aldermen have extremely little control,” he said. “That’s a problem. Schools wind up being very local issues. People need to have governance that gives them confidence that their democratic voice is being taken into account.”