-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
A total of 29.4% of voters disapproved Pritzker’s handling of COVID-19 last month, the survey said.
Mark Brown: “In addition to Toomin, another judge Democrats will oppose for retention is Mauricio Araujo, who is under fire over multiple sexual harassment allegations and for issuing more than 80 search warrants to two Chicago police officers convicted of using them to commit crimes.”
The program boasts a “commitment” not just to “ideas in the abstract,” but also to more concrete action in the form of “activating histories of engaged art, debate, struggle, collective action, and counterrevolution as contexts for the emergence of ideas and narratives.”
State Superintendent Carmen Ayala says creativity is helping to bridge the gap: “We have had areas where the universities opened up their internet access, and we have families that were able to park in the parking lot and download some of the lessons.”
Harvey officials say that the suspension of the licenses stems from failure to adhere to the terms of an excise tax that went into effect in 2008.
The mayor released still photos from the footage at a news conference on June 11, where she vowed to hold the officers to account. The Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating the incident, and “an evaluation” is underway by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, Lightfoot said.
“Dr. Allison Arwady, the public health commissioner, told reporters that ‘there’s always some bumps in the road in terms of figuring out things like payrolls.’ Later, a public health spokesman blamed hiring delays on civil unrest in May and June that followed the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, saying that many of the agencies that would take part in the effort were involved in helping the community at that time.”
“We also hope CPS has better success this fall in reaching children who essentially have gone missing, as more than 2,000 children did last spring. Security officers will start to make home visits this week to connect with students who have not responded to other outreach efforts.”
A recent audit of DCFS found that the system designed to protect Illinois’ vulnerable children had prior contact with 102 kids who died from 2015 to 2017. The report found that there were 163 prior investigations for the 102 victims, with one person investigated nine times before their death.
H. Edward Wynn, author: “A graduated income tax may very well be the right public policy choice, or it may not be. Why don’t our leaders and the media trust us to make that choice based on the facts, not misleading and false arguments. The people of Illinois deserve better.”
“COVID’s not going away. It’s here to stay,” said Heather Ewalt, mother of a high school senior, “and I can’t imagine our lives this way forever.”
Executive Director Nikki Budzinski, who recently left the Pritzker administration, said the nonprofit will unveil new policy initiatives not only in the energy sector but also infrastructure and other policy areas in the coming months.
“Our families are experiencing economic stress, and also just not very familiar with being around each other all that often,” said Bill Steinhauser, of Bethany for Children and Families. “And that stress as well as economic stress are causing our families to do as any other family, which is experience dysfunction. And also they’re trying to escape from the reality of COVID-19.”
“As young people abandon this state or don’t return here to start their families and careers, the Illinois Exodus intensifies. Every time a taxpayer departs for Florida, Tennessee or Texas, the tax burden on those of us who remain grows heavier. So each of us should think skeptically, not reflexively by political tribe, about what the Pritzker Tax would do to Illinois.”
“So where we go from here, I don’t know,” said owner Janet Thomas. “We stretched it out as far as we could.” Thomas says she needs to raise $50,000 in just a matter of weeks, or they fear they will have to close for good.
Half of the workers surveyed said they felt “unsafe or very unsafe” working during the pandemic. Assembly lines typically have machines that can’t be moved to accommodate for social distancing, and many said their companies did not disclose when other workers got the virus.
The city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance created just 1,049 homes in 13 years by requiring some developers to set aside 10% or 20% of new units for low- and moderate-income Chicagoans. That has barely dented the city’s affordable housing gap of nearly 120,000 homes,
Marin said she will continue to serve as co-director of the Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence at DePaul University, which she co-founded in 2016. Don Moseley, co-director of the center and Marin’s longtime producer and reporting collaborator, also will be leaving NBC 5.
“We’re not back to business as usual. We’re still operating in the same mode. The summer became a social end to the pandemic,” said James Rudyk, of Northwest Side Housing Center. “We’re saying the pandemic is still real, the need is still real.”
Illinois is the extreme outlier nationally when it comes to losing people. Illinois is one of just four states to shrink over the past decade and no state has lost more population during that time period. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Looking back, the first-term Democratic governor remains angry over the federal government’s response to the pandemic, while the top state and city of Chicago public health officials say they were surprised early on that there was so much pushback on measures such as mandates to wear masks in public.
“At the city’s tallest building, Willis Tower, 15,000 office workers poured through the lobby on a typical day before the pandemic. On Thursday, between 8 and 9 a.m., Tribune reporters counted 75 people passing through its main entrance…Willis Tower exemplifies the struggles, and high financial stakes, of the downtown office market.”
Last July, Toomin appointed Dan Webb as a special prosecutor to investigate the handling of the Smollett case after all of Smollet’s charges were dropped; Toomin noted “unprecedented irregularities” and referred to Smollett as a “charlatan who fomented a hoax.” Toomin also suggested Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx mishandled the case.
“A lot of tenants have been out of work for months. They have not been able to pay rent, and now they’re behind by hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars, and those people are at risk of eviction as soon as an eviction moratorium is raised,” said Kathleen Roberts of the North Spaulding Renters Association.
There are about 380,000 lead service lines in Chicago, many of them used by single-family and two-flat homes. It will take years and cost an estimated $8.5 billion for all of those lines to be replaced.
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