The Wheel Tax is an annual license fee authorizing the use of any motor vehicle within the unincorporated areas of Cook County.

McDonald’s, which has its headquarters there, criticized the city for crime. Iit’s staying in Chicago, but other companies that are leaving the city have been less forthcoming about their reasons.

Its demise is the latest fallout of a yearslong assault by federal prosecutors on old-school Chicago-style corruption. Members of some of Chicago’s most prominent political empires have been disgraced by charges they traded power for fortunes. As prosecutors have described their evidence, others, like Ald. Carrie Austin and state Sen. Emil Jones III, were caught with their hands in a cookie jar taking far less.

For example, there’s more than $78 million in unfunded maintenance needs over the next several years to replace roofs and HVAC systems, repave parking lots and repair dams and shorelines, the proposed budget outlines. The pension fund needs $10 million a year or else it will run out of money by 2041, and both the Zoo and Botanic Garden each have urgent capital improvements.

“Last year, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the City Council started acting with the requisite urgency when we passed a budget with $65 million directed to supportive housing and an additional $20 million allocated for rapid rehousing. When the federal dollars that funded these investments dry up, however, city government must stand ready with a permanent funding source in hand.”

Seventeen of Chicago’s 50 City Council members have declined a 9.62% pay raise tied to the inflation rate that would boost the maximum annual salary for a Chicago alderperson to $142,772.

Because of remote or hybrid schedules, drivers are hitting the road at all times of the day, making the congestion more unpredictable than it was before COVID-19 came to Chicago. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning found that if 25% of those who used to take public transit before COVID use a car instead, drivers in Chicago will spend an extra 193,000 hours on the road each weekday.

Nearly 1.1 million tickets were written, compared to 850,000 for the first six months of 2021. To be clear, Chicago City Comptroller Reshma Soni said the city gets all of the parking ticket revenue.

Rep. Theresa Mah, long a key proponent for the project, has backed the organizers and pledged to yank critical state funding for the school. Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez said he would rally fellow aldermen to vote down the city’s effort to approve $7 million in TIF funding to buy the Wabash Avenue land as part of the deal.

Truly amazing drone video.

Sued for nearly $1 million in back rent for a Fulton Market storefront, a national cannabis chain says a federal judge can’t order it to pay up because its business isn’t even allowed to operate under federal law. But the landlord, Thor Equities, said Illinois law actually closes that potential loophole and insists the lease is both “valid and enforceable.”

That’s the word the mayor’s officials shared with aldermen today, even as Cook County chief Toni Preckwinkle pledged in a meeting with Crain’s to make her administration’s cash assistance program permanent.

“The election-year budget relies on the continued use of some $1 billion in federal pandemic aid, which the county has until 2026 to spend. In the meantime, county officials will have to ask themselves hard questions about which new programs are worth paying for over the long haul — and which ones simply aren’t sustainable.”

Demands for a full-blown Department of Environment, more funding for the homeless and mental health and hiring incentives to reverse a record pace of police retirements emerged Monday as pressure points during the first day of City Council hearings on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $16.4 billion budget.

The Citizens Utility Board, a watchdog group, said this winter’s prices will be the highest since the season of 2008-09.