In an outline of her 10-year strategy to remake the city’s economy and rebuild its population to 3 million, the mayor focuses on seven industry clusters. The full text of Lightfoot’s speech on this is linked here.

This time, the point of contention was the mayor’s plan to abolish four tax-increment-financing districts as part of declaring a record $300 million TIF surplus to help balance the city budget and bankroll the new teachers contract.

Three TIFs — Harlem Industrial, Pershing/King and South Works Industrial — were abolished without controversy by the City Council’s Finance Committee.

In the last school year Douglass High School was enrolled at only 5% of its capacity. Fenger, 15%. Hirsch, 10%. Manley, 6%. Austin and Tilden, 11%. Many Chicago elementary schools also are miserably underutilized — even as some CPS schools are overcrowded.

One of the more indefensible scams in Illinois politics is the legal right of dozens of officeholders to take money donated to their campaigns and blow it on pretty much whatever they want. Makes you wonder why a lobbyist can’t just give an elected official that BMW instead of campaign cash. It amounts to the same thing.