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“The consulting firm was co-founded a decade ago by Robert Creamer, husband of Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and a felon who pleaded guilty
Mark Konkol: “When the Sun-Times asked directly about Griffin’s assertion that ‘the government’s most basic responsibility is to protect its citizens, and the Governor is failing Chicagoans,’ a Pritzker spokesperson ‘declined to respond.’ Pritzker instead tried to deflect jabs from Illinois’ richest man with talk of, you guessed it, partisan politics.”
AAA said the state average was $3.56 per gallon, while the national average was $3.41. Nationally, a gallon of gas is 11 cents more expensive than a month ago and $1.29 more than a year ago.
“This is simply an unacceptable and disgraceful state of affairs,” Rush said. “The financial straits that many of these south suburban municipalities find themselves in due to structural disadvantages and the COVID-19 pandemic mean that they are simply not in a fiscal place to take on their water issues alone.”
The law Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed Monday also makes necessary adjustments for a new primary election date. It was moved from March 15 to June 28 because late Census numbers delayed drawing new congressional district boundaries.
CPS is demanding the students be expelled from their current schools immediately and be banned from attending any selective enrollment school in the future.
The city doesn’t yet know how much money from the federal infrastructure bill will flow to Chicago.
The disciplinary hearing before the Chicago Police Board is over accusations of violating 11 CPD rules in connection to 18 allegations involving controversial posts on social media. While on the stand Catanzara was combative and unapologetic with city attorneys, and under defense questioning defended his actions and said he 100% considers himself a whistleblower.
Illinois sportsbooks reported just over $596 million in handle, good for the second-best month ever behind last March.
Alison Maley with the Illinois Principals Association said, “Without a limit on administrative leave days or a sunset for this provision to expire, we are really concerned about how this will affect staffing and providing a quality education to our students. Test-to-stay is great but the incentive is to be home and be paid, I think it disincentivizes individuals from participating in test-to-stay.”
State Rep. Tom Demmer spoke against the bill. “In order to implement a program like this statewide and in order to provide that funding the Department of Health Care and Family Services estimated that anywhere between $960 million and $2.9 billion dollars could be the cost. I can not support a community health worker program for which there is no funding, no eligible services for reimbursement, and no appropriation.”
In a link attached to the tweet, U.S. Rep. Mary Miller shared a piece from Wirepoints calling for more than just platitudes to assist the manufacturing industry in Illinois. In the article, Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner point out just how bad things have gotten for manufacturing in Illinois, noting that the state has lost more than 300,000 jobs since 2000, according to Wirepoints.
A company based in New Jersey will reopen the Melrose Park hospital as a specialty hospital that would include 80 acute mental illness beds, along with drug and alcohol addiction services. Woodlake officials have said the hospital would create “at least 500 to 600 permanent jobs.”
They’re working on a set of recommendations aimed at addressing poverty, racism, trauma, and other things that may affect children’s learning. Some lawmakers say this is pushing a social agenda, but education officials say that’s not the case.
“First, reining in property taxes requires enlisting Springfield’s help. One of the major drivers of ever-rising property taxes is the pension crisis that politicians at both the state and local level have allowed to metastasize…Second, given the mess that (joe) Berrios made of the assessor’s office, reform is the only path forward. There’s no turning back.”
Aldermen have been working with cartographers and attorneys in private sessions at City Hall since August, and must pass a map by the end of the month otherwise voters themselves could decide between competing maps through a referendum. Warned Ald. Jason Ervin, chair the council’s Black Caucus, “Don’t be surprised if we’re meeting” the day before the Dec. 1 deadline.
“We already know that learning suffered tremendously last year,” said Scott Marion, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Assessment, which consults with the district on testing. “The question is what do you do about it?”
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the top U.S. destinations for foreign students, enrolled 7,674 international students in fall 2020, a 28% drop from the year before, driven down by losses from China and India. This fall, though, it has just shy of 10,000 international students enrolled, plus nearly 3,000 in the U.S. for postgraduate training programs, landing back where it was two years ago. “We knew we would rebound, but we didn’t know how significantly,” said Martin McFarlane, UIUC’s director of international student and scholar services.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker may be celebrating Illinois’ projected lower deficits, but they owe little to what he’s done since taking office. If the budget numbers look any better it’s overwhelmingly due to the $182 billion in federal stimulus/COVID funds that have flooded into Illinois government coffers and private sector accounts.
The expected massive tax increases in 2022 will be fueled by the 2021 triennial reassessment in Chicago, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to link future property tax increases to the rise in inflation.
As a result of this double-tax tsunami, renters in the North Side neighborhoods of Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, Old Town, River North, and Streeterville should brace themselves for hefty rent increases next year.
UChicago has several close ties to the new project, with Dorian Abbot, Robert Zimmer, and Geoffrey Stone sitting on UATX’s Board of Advisors. Abbot also told the Thinker that the “‘Chicago Principles’ and ‘Kalven Report’ have strongly informed the thinking that has gone into UATX.” The “Chicago Principles” refer to the set of principles outlined in a 2015 report by UChicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression
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