wHappy Saturday!

While we’ve allowed ourselves to be enchanted by warm spring weather and distracted by the Washington, D.C. soap opera, Chicago has done a few things worth noting this week.

1. Chicago’s Police Policy Reform Efforts Took One Step Forward, One Step Back

Police policy reform advanced this week when city Inspector General Joe Ferguson announced his nomination of Laura Kunard as the Deputy IG for Public Safety. Once Kunard, an accomplished criminology academic, is confirmed by City Council, she’ll be bestowed with a series of brand new powers for the IG’s office, including the authority to investigate the Chicago Police Department and IPRA/COPA. These new investigatory powers were granted as part of last October’s police reform ordinance. Reform advocates have a long list of things for her to investigate, including CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and following up on recommendations made by last year’s Police Accountability Task Force.

Meanwhile news from Washington this week made it clear that a federal consent decree for police reform was dead, dead, dead. It was no surprise to many reform advocates, since then-Candidate Donald Trump telegraphed his displeasure with federal “interference” with local policing. “[The] DOJ consent decree was effectively dead in November,” one advocate told me earlier this week.

The loss of the consent decree removes political cover for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, says Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman in an excellent analysis of the political ramifications created by the consent decree’s death. In short: You can’t win election without the Black vote. Chicago’s black voters want police reform. But now Emanuel’s going to have to implement believable reform without the Feds playing the heavy.

Reform advocates have long anticipated and prepared for Trump and Sessions’ decision to kill federal assistance for police reform. One option, advocates say privately, is to pursue a civilian-run suit for a consent decree. In Oakland, California a group of citizens successfully sued the city in 2012, alleging years of police brutality and racial profiling. As a result, a federal judge appointed a full-time compliance director who had the power to fire the city’s police superintendent and make police policy changes without city approval.

Such a suit could be difficult and costly if the city of Chicago was not cooperative, say advocates, since it would require rounding up dozens or even hundreds of plaintiffs willing to testify they were targeted as part of long-running patterns and practices of the police department.

2. The Clock Continues To Tick For CPS

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you know that Chicago Public Schools need a helping hand. With a $210 million deficit this year, unless CPS gets the money from somebody, they’re going to have to close 13 school days early. The school system can’t raise taxes, because of a state mandated property tax cap, and its credit is so bad, further borrowing isn’t realistic. Gov. Bruce Rauner has repeatedly said he won’t allow a Chicago schools bailout and sympathetic Democrats in the state legislature don’t have enough votes to override Rauner’s veto.

That leaves the City of Chicago and its taxpayers as the funder of last resort. Since The Chicago Board of Education (the official name for CPS) and the city are two separate government entities, the city could potentially buy debt from the Board, at whatever interest rate it chooses. The trouble is: Where would the city of Chicago get the money to pay for it?

As we get closer to the end of the school year, the likelihood of a Chicago-CPS bailout becomes increasingly likely, but Mayor Emanuel isn’t giving any public hint that he’s willing to consider one.

Politically, he can’t. It would be Gov. Rauner’s dream for Chicago to bailout CPS, since Rauner could then turn to the rest of the state and say, “See, I made Chicago pay its own bills!” and would set a precedent for Chicago to pick up a bigger slice of its education costs than it has in the past.

But it seems more and more likely that Chicago will have to pick up the check. While there’s still two more months of legislative session in Springfield, the town is gridlocked and the State Senate’s grand bargain on the state budget is barely limping along.

Allowing CPS schools to close three weeks early would create a cascading series of problems for Chicago. Suddenly you’d have 380,000 kids across Chicago with no day care or activities to occupy them. Unless summer jobs and day camps start early, the system would struggle to keep them engaged and out of trouble. High school juniors counting on end-of-year athletic contests that determine college scholarships would miss their shot. Not to mention three weeks of student instruction that would be cut.

And then there’s the political fallout Mayor Emanuel would have to endure. Even though Springfield won’t pick up the check, it’s the mayor who wears the jacket.

So, unless the state legislature passes a veto-proof bailout in the next six weeks or so, it seems almost a done deal that the Chicago City Council will have to take a vote to cough up the $210 million difference.

Some portion could probably come from a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) account sweep. How much, nobody outside the Mayor’s Office knows, since the state of TIF accounts are closely guarded. But then the rest, let’s say a remaining $100 million, would have to come from some sort of new tax. Creating yet another tax vote for aldermen already wondering how many more tax votes they’ll have to take between now and the 2019 elections.

3. An Important Education Advocate Steps Aside

If you’ve spent any time in the world of Chicago public education over the last few years, chance are you’ve crossed paths with advocate Wendy Katten. A North Center parent with a son in CPS, Katten founded and led the volunteer public school parent organization Raise Your Hand for seven years, acting as a moderating voice that often seemed to split a reasonable difference between the Chicago Teacher’s Union and CPS leadership.

But then this week, Katten announced that she was stepping down from Raise Your Hand leadership because her family was moving to Evanston so her son could begin high school at Evanston Township High School. It was a shocking decision for many observers, especially since Katten was so committed to Chicago public education.

When I caught up with her on Thursday afternoon, Katten expressed a combination of sorrow and relief that she’d made the decision. Her neighborhood didn’t suit her family any more and her husband was from Evanston, one important factor. But also, her son was heading into high school and the CPS high school decision process was “demoralizing” for her family.

“Part of this is really all about CPS not taking over my life. This is a good move for my family,” Katten told me.

“We have the privilege to [leave], and some people don’t. We can pick up and move. I’m aware of that,” Katten said. But she was relieved to move on because between having a kid in CPS and being a full-time advocate, CPS pervaded almost every aspect of her life.

She and her family struggled with finding a good CPS high school for her son.

“I found the school selection process demoralizing and developmentally inappropriate,” for a 13 year-old, she said. “It was a burdensome process.”

As she admitted though, Katten and her family have choices. Living in the decidedly middle-class part of North Center, but within the boundaries of a great CPS elementary school, Katten’s family will have no problem picking up and leaving the fiscal and organizational mess Chicago Public Schools have become. While many other families, have no choice but to lump it.

Taking over for Katten will be a pair of South Siders, Hyde Park resident Joy Clendenning, and Bridgeporter Jennie Biggs. Both are former teachers.

I called Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, for a simple quote on a story Thursday afternoon, but he was in a loquacious mood, and a five minute check-in turned into a half hour conversation. He’s in the middle of a tight run-off election. Mail-in ballots will be counted on Tuesday, April 12, and his union is flexing on police reform.

Inspector General Joe Ferguson announced his pick Thursday for a new public safety deputy, Laura Kunard, an academic who's done extensive research on policing issues and who once served as a court-appointed monitor for a federal consent decree in Albuquerque. The appointment comes after an exhaustive national search for the post.

The Council’s Housing Committee approved all items on their agenda Wednesday morning, including two lease agreements on behalf of the Chicago Police Department and land sales in the city’s Grand Boulevard, South Shore, and Woodlawn neighborhoods.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t the only elected official in Chicago to work around a rule in the city’s ethics ordinance that bars elected officials from soliciting more than $1,500 from people or entities that do business with the city. Ald. Sophia King’s (4) reported fundraising activity for February indicates at least five separate donations from LLCs tied to one Chicago development firm that obtained zoning approval from the city in the last year.

While the mayor might’ve benefitted the most from the workaround, The Daily Line’s regular review of monthly campaign contributions for city and county elected officials shows several similar cases of this practice: multiple attorneys from the same firm who do regular business before the city will donate to a campaign in a single month, developers with pending zoning projects will donate to the same alderman under different LLCs registered under the same address, or spouses will each donate the maximum amount allowed by an individual, doubling the candidate’s take.

A group of land sales and a lease extension for the police department to rent out training space for new recruits at Kennedy-King College are up for consideration from City Council’s Housing Committee Wednesday.

Only two months after passage in the 2017 budget, Cook County’s “Invest in Cook” program to fund local transportation projects has tens of millions of dollars of proposals. Unlike Chicago’s aldermanic menu money program, which provides each alderman with $1.3 million in discretionary funding, the county’s aims to provide a local match for federal funds, rather than pay for entire projects.

Aldermen from City Council’s Black and Latino Caucus joined Rev. Leon Finney at Galileo Elementary School Monday to announce plans to file amicus briefs in Chicago Public Schools’ pending case against the state–an uncommon practice in Cook County’s Circuit Court. Ald. Danny Solis (25), the local alderman, joined Black Caucus Chairman Roderick Sawyer (6) and Latino Caucus Chairman George Cardenas (12), as well as Ald. Gilbert Villegas (36) at the podium in Galileo’s library. While the group called for the court to end the disparity “once and for all,” and argued the evidence in CPS’ favor was “overwhelming” and showed “a pattern of discrimination” from the state, no briefs were released until hours later.

Happy April Fools’ Day!

Sometimes the world’s axis seems to tilt just a bit more, and there’s a crazy confluence of events. When that happens, the steady beat of the news drums turns into a pair of rampaging kettle drums. This week, the kettle drums got walloped twice.

1. Affordable Housing, CHA’s Plan for Transformation and The Cost of Segregation

This week, a pair of reports, one that quantifies in dollars the cost of Chicago’s segregation, and a second from the Chicago Inspector General on the fiscal management of the city’s affordable housing program, piled onto another monster report last week on the poor state of the Chicago Housing Authority’s mixed-use, affordable housing program, The Plan For Transformation. Threading through all three reports and issues are the value of real estate, and how in Chicago, “the wrong side of the tracks” really means something.

The Metropolitan Planning Council and Urban Institute’s report on segregation charges that, “If the economic and the black-white segregation measures were the median amount, the associated increase in black per capita income would be 15.1 percent, or $2,982, making for an aggregate increase of $4.4 billion in black per capita income.” The report is chock-full of findings, like that the Chicago-area is the 5th most segregated region in the country.

Meanwhile, two of the vehicles meant to help unwind Chicago’s segregation, mixed-income and affordable housing, continue to have problems, according to recent reports. Last week WBEZ published the results of a study conducted with Northwestern University, finding that less than 8% of former CHA public housing residents, uprooted in the 1990’s from demolished public housing projects like Stateway Gardens and Cabrini Green, were resettled in promised mixed-income developments as part of the Plan For Transformation. CHA says it is rebooting its efforts, but for twenty years, CHA hasn’t had shown much results.

The other housing prong, affordable housing, is managed by the Chicago Department of Planning. To its credit, since 2015 DPD has created “north of 20,000” of a 41,000 unit goal of affordable housing units, however, a recent Chicago Inspector General report found $4.5 million of affordable housing funds from 2013 to 2015 was inappropriately accounted for.

2. Sanctuary Status & ICE at Odds

Incredibly, just as U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was threatening in a press conference Monday to ‘claw back’ federal funds to Chicago law enforcement because it insisted on not assisting federal immigration officials, Chicago’s immigrant community was reeling from a dawn raid that same day by said immigration officials who shot a 53-year old man, Felix Torres Sr., in his Belmont-Cragin house.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were pursuing Torres’s son, Felix Torres, Jr, who was wanted on felony weapons charges. Part of ICE’s purview, includes investigating drugs and weapons smuggling. ICE has not answered questions about whether or not immigration status was part of Torres Jr’s arrest, but they did announce later this week that they found two weapons in a search of the Torres’ home.

While it seems that ICE’s morning raid was not attempting to apprehend an undocumented immigrant, Monday’s convergence of events managed to highlight the fears of immigrant advocates, that Chicago’s sanctuary status will only make ordinary law enforcement more difficult, as immigrants of all statuses, legal and otherwise, will fear interactions with police.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel responded to Session’s threats, calling them “a bit of a joke” since Department of Justice funding is already scheduled to be cut in President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

Chicago City Council convened this week for a pretty non-controversial agenda. But what didn’t make it to the Council floor is a lot more interesting. This week, we focus on a group of Jefferson Park residents fighting back against dense development (and why), and detail some items that were either delayed, or aren’t fully fleshed out: restrictions on street performers, set-asides for veterans on city contracts, and a new municipal ID program.

Got questions, comments, or suggestions? Email us: [email protected].  

An intergovernmental agreement between the city and the Chicago Board of Education introduced at Wednesday’s City Council meeting would allocate up to $48 million from the River South Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district to construct a new elementary school in the South Loop, bringing the city’s total TIF investment in the project to $59 million. It’s one of the biggest investments of TIF for a single school construction in Mayor Emanuel’s tenure.

 

In addition to the big headline items outlined in our City Council wrap, and other items previewed in the days ahead of council (the crackdown on party buses, the expansion of the city’s Smart Lighting program, and a call for the city to back the Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative) aldermen and Mayor Emanuel introduced dozens of measures that caught our eye. We've catalogued close to 150 non-routine and zoning items in our monthly spreadsheet here: March Introductions. As of this writing, language was not available for most measures. We’ll have a more thorough rundown soon.

A Chicago-sponsored ID program for the city’s undocumented, and possibly underage homeless as well as formerly incarcerated residents is one step closer to reality with an official ordinance introduced at Wednesday’s full City Council meeting. Two downtown aldermen ditched their preliminary noise ban on downtown street performers with a new measure “aimed at striking a fair compromise.” And after winning her runoff election, Ald. Sophia King (4) was officially sworn in to finish out the remainder of Will Burns’ term.

SEIU Local 1 members kept up pressure on aldermen who had yet to sponsor their ordinance requiring airliners to agree to fair wage standards for subcontractors when they apply for a lease agreement with the city, passing out fliers accusing several aldermen of “siding with airlines over Chicago’s workers,” and showing some sitting atop a United aircraft, with Ald. Ed Burke (14) at front with his arms outstretched, in front of Ald. Tom Tunney (44), Ald. Marty Quinn (13), Ald. Mike Zalewski (23), Ald. Marge Laurino (40), and Ald. Pat O’Connor (40).

 

Aldermen on City Council’s Finance Committee delayed consideration of two items Tuesday: an easing of the city’s flavored tobacco ban for some retailers, and new work rules for pharmacists. Both items backed by Chairman Ed Burke (14) were held, and both items had constituencies lined up to testify for and against. The rest of the day’s agenda passed easily and without much questioning from aldermen, though protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline did take the opportunity to testify on more than half of the items, pleading with aldermen to take action.