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Chairman Emanuel “Chris” Welch and Rep. Tom Demmer couldn’t come to an agreement on how to document their Monday phone call with U.S. Attorney John Lausch. Instead, the Democrat and Republican sent separate letters including their personal understanding of what happened.
“It’s frustrating that the CPS has not been more proactive in developing a plan to reopen. We currently have no metric or measure that will allow for schools to reopen in winter. Rather, we wait for CPS and CTU to argue to a solution.”
State officials are in the process of notifying those who won grants from a lottery used to distribute more than $300 million in help to landlords and tenants struggling to make ends meet. Funds began to flow on Thursday to those who applied for assistance paying their rent and mortgage, and should be completed by Oct. 31.
“We will be taking names. We will be slating candidates. … We will have a $1 million-a-year PAC going forward starting next year. And in 2023, there’s going to be a day of reckoning for these aldermen who think they can skate by under the radar and say they support the police, but do nothing,” FOP President John Catanzara said.
The district employs 37,775 people but that does not include vendors. CPS attributed most of the cases to exposure in the community or household members who also tested positive. Less than 13% of all cases — 33 of the 258 — have been tied to a cluster, in which multiple cases were identified at a school within a period of 14 days.
Being limited to bricks-and-mortar sales makes the city’s 25% capacity limit especially challenging, one business owner said. “How are you supposed to be at 25% of your sales and 100% of your rent, and no one is helping you out financially?”
The Big Ten Conference on Wednesday reversed course to allow football this fall, and neighboring states such as Missouri and Indiana plan to allow high school football to continue. Pritzker said Wednesday that is one of the tragedies of not having a national strategy.
Said state Sen. Kimberly Lightford, D-Maywood, “We cannot afford to have another generation of students to be on the school-to-prison pipeline. In Illinois, 22 percent of Black students are ready for kindergarten, 15 percent can read by fourth grade, and Black students have a 75 percent graduation rate. Each of those metrics falls behind children of different races.
“Following the Great Recession in 2011, former Gov. Pat Quinn and state lawmakers jacked taxes up from 3% to 5%, again with the promise it would be temporary. Quinn said the increase was to help the state pay the bills and regain sound financial footing. Former Senate President John Cullerton promised it would help pay for pensions without borrowing.”
Link was the fourth state legislator who supported Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s progressive income tax amendment to be charged with a crime in the past year. He is now the third member to resign.
“Frankly sad, disappointed and frustrated. Because they are in a budget deficit. They’re raising taxes…and they are going to turn down a $300,000 offer compared to a dollar,” said Stephen Cioromski.
The company submitted 25 perfect applications under the name GRI Holdings LLC, meaning it could win the right to open up to 10 stores. Under one estimate, those licenses could be worth more than $133 million. But GRI’s registered managers make up a clouted mix of insiders and others with ties to state politics.
The Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) recently stopped accepting applications for its Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program in early September. IHDA says almost 20,000 homeowners applied.
“I believe that’s a pretty good month, but I don’t have anything to compare it to,” said Tom Swoik, executive director of the Illinois Casino Gaming Association. “I think since the casinos just reopened with 50% occupancy, and now four with just 25%, this is going to help us.”
Collinsville Community Unit School District 10 was one of the first districts to move from a hybrid plan to full remote learning once the testing numbers began to spike at the end of summer break. It also was the first to bring students back into the classrooms, which it began doing last Tuesday.
“We have watched professional sports and even some college teams play, seemingly without many problems,” Pritzker said. “But remember these programs are operating with daily testing or in a league-created bubble or with facilities that allow for outsized social distancing and are sanitized every day, and in some cases all of those precautions have been taken. That’s not what’s available to the vast majority of young people who play sports in Illinois.”
“If anybody can understand race, it’s me,” Wilson said.
House Republicans offered this version of the conversation with the U.S. Attorney’s office: “There was no indication we have to stay within the parameters of the (deferred prosecution agreement). There was no objection to asking witnesses to testify. They didn’t want us asking for docs that a witness (mainly ComEd) would have gotten from the Feds and were not included in the DPA. It was specific to the DPA.”
“Justice looks like having someone advocate for them and having someone really give them the resources they need to be a survivor,” she said. “It gives them their control back, and I think when you seek justice that is what you really want. It is not ‘an eye for an eye’. It is, ‘I want somebody to care that this happened to me. I want some resources. I want to feel safe.’”
Comment: The women in this video display enough optimism and resolve to save the city.
Of the $27 million collected through the tax refund intercept program this year, $20.7 million has been collected from Chicago residents. Of that, approximately 83.8% hit residents in ZIP codes where the median household income falls below the city’s overall median household income of $55,000.
Pritzker is wrong to say pension reform is a “fantasy.” Well-established federal law says he is wrong. Precedent from other states show why he is wrong. And Pritzker’s own lawyers have effectively explained why he is wrong.
It’s partly because Illinois has shown no willingness to cut even a dime that Washington has been unable to agree on a federal relief package for states.
“So here’s the bottom line: the city really has no particularly good options. But the city risks making a bad situation even worse, if it looks for solutions that promise a free lunch rather than making hard choices.”
Despite one of the biggest scandals of his tenure, House Speaker Mike Madigan’s campaign coffers are the biggest they’ve ever been with roughly $25 million cash on hand going into the final stretch of the 2020 election season, according to campaign finance records.
“The 2019 capital bill came with huge tax and fee hikes, including a doubled state gas tax, with the promise to repair roads among other things. However, the Illinois Policy Institute identified $1.4 billion of waste in the plan, including dog parks, pickleball courts and money for a privately owned, defunct theater.”
“An analysis by Wirepoints calculated that a $75,000 per year earner in Illinois would have to pay nine percent in state income taxes under Pritzker’s spending plans. Arguments like Wirepoints’ were omitted from ‘Everything you need to know about the Graduated Income Tax,’ a primer on the debate for Sun-Times readers, written by Sun-Times political reporters Tina Sfondeles and Rachel Hinton. Far from ‘everything,’ Sfondeles and Hinton didn’t include ‘anything’ other than arguments from Gov. J.B. Pritzker in favor of the measure.”
“As soon as dining rooms were closed, and they had to put up physical barriers, alter restaurants, essentially rendering our restaurants nonfunctional, that’s when we’re damaged, and at that point, that’s when insurance should have recognized that we suffered physical loss as a result of those orders, and paid our claims,” says plaintiffs’ attorney Gabriel Gillett.
“They tell you everything that’s wrong with Chicago and Cook County’s toxic politics: judges like Toomin being muscled out of office and residents brought to the morgue because of bad public policy as homicide numbers keep rising.”
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