“Of the 19 people who represent Illinois in Washington, 16 are Democrats. But a little less than half of Illinoisans have voted for Republicans, and their voices are being drowned out by self-serving politicians.”
The pipeline runs right through Kenny Davis’ modest Scott County, Illinois, farm, where he had planned to build a home for him and his wife once he retired from working as an electrical lineman. “I can’t do that now,” he said. “I’ve got a pipeline right here.” He points out a roughly
So far, city officials have taken a hard stance against activists seeking permits to demonstrate during the Democratic Convention this August, denying requested protest routes of three groups in the last month alone. But due to a technicality, the city was forced on appeal Monday to allow one of those groups to march nearly right up to the United Center’s front doors. The Poor People’s Army was granted its permit after the city failed to respond to the application within its own 10-day deadline.
Johnson administration budget officials expected this program to bring in $5 million this year. But the city’s use of automated ticketing, including for red light and speed violations, and its fine and fee structure have drawn concerns from critics in recent years. Several investigations found low-income violators have been hit hardest by the city’s ticketing practices, and households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes in Chicago “received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas,” despite cameras being roughly evenly distributed across the city.
More than 5,000 students attending magnet and selective enrollment schools saw their bus routes canceled as the district said it has continued to grapple with a severe bus driver shortage. “Students and parents are now facing commutes up to five hours per day. Some have resorted to unreliable and potentially unsafe third-party transportation services costing families hundreds of dollars each month,” said Hal Woods with Kids First Chicago.
Super PACs, known in Illinois as independent expenditure committees, can raise and spend unlimited funds to support or oppose candidates or issues. This fund seems to run parallel to Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s efforts to oust incumbent Board of Review Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr. in the March 19 Democratic primary. Kaegi, his campaign fund and family have recently donated more than $28,000 in cash and in-kind campaign help Rogers’s opponent.
The coalition’s request for a permit to demonstrate within view and earshot of the DNC was denied. Instead, an alternate march route was proposed, which is not in close proximity to where the convention is taking place. Nazek Sankari of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network stated, “The City of Chicago must allow us our constitutional right to protest and assemble and petition this government for a redress of grievances.”
Bryan Hitchcock, chief science and technology officer with the Institute of Food Technologists, said that some businesses may consider what products they produce and distribute to Illinois, or they may opt to leave the state entirely depending on their business plans and priorities. “Compliance is going to be very costly, including researching alternative ingredients, developing and testing alternative products, navigating higher ingredient costs, designing new labels and setting up new supply chains.”
State Rep. Mike Coffey, who owns several restaurants, said while there may be good intentions for such a move, if passed into law, it would hurt consumers, employers and employees across the board. “All we do is between energy prices that are going up at a rapid rate, between food costs and everything going up, between the minimum wage, all they’re doing is ensuring that more and more businesses in the state of Illinois go out of business.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council released its “Other Post-Employment Benefit Liability” report, which ranked Illinois 46th in the country. It shows that Illinois has about $103 billion in unfunded post-employment liabilities, including health insurance, life insurance and Medicare Supplement Insurance. That is on top of around $140 billion in unfunded pension liabilities.
Legislation filed at the Illinois Statehouse is in response to a funeral home in Carlinville that cremated an individual, but the remains were given to the wrong family by the funeral director. If approved and passed into law, the measure would make the new punishment for any misuse of human remains a Class 4 felony.
State Rep. Dan Caulkins has argued that because certain individuals can still own banned weapons legally if they get a special endorsement on their firearm owners identification card while others cannot, the law constitutes “special legislation.” While the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court both declined to block enforcement of the law temporarily, a gun rights group has said it will appeal to the full U.S. high court to challenge the law’s legality on federal constitutional grounds.
In addition to Hispanic students’ high rates of absenteeism in CPS, only 22% of Hispanic students in third through eighth grade were proficient in reading and 13% in math in the 2022-2023 school year.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson cited his role as a husband and father for his busy schedule managing public safety, homelessness and the city’s budget: “I’m doing all of that with a Black wife, raising three Black children on the West Side of Chicago. I am going to the boarder as soon as possible, but I’ve got to coordinate that with running the government and making sure that my wife and children are secure as well.”
A Cook County judge required Lincolnwood Elementary School Assistant Principal Jasmine Sebaggala to cover $38,000 in legal fees incurred by Skokie mother Helen Levinson after the judge dismissed a lawsuit Sebaggala filed against Levinson. The lawsuit alleges that Levinson made defamatory statements about Sebaggala and intentionally inflicted emotional distress. Sebaggala is a racial equity advocate involved in the Abolition Coalition, which seeks to promote anti-racism education in public schools.
The city government has not contributed to the police and fire pension funds since September. East St. Louis already had been behind in funding the pensions by millions of dollars when it stopped its contributions, officials said. City Manager Robert Betts said intercepting roughly $7 million in state money and shifting it to the pension funds would be devastating for the city, triggering layoffs and cuts in services. “The city is bracing itself for the intercept.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu last year also announced a public-private partnership that expands tax breaks for conversions to housing. Developers must reserve at least 20% of their new units as affordable, with some space for federal voucher holders as well. Chicago and Pittsburgh have put similar tax deals in place in the past two years, with affordable housing stipulations attached.
Jim Dey: “One bit of unsettling news is that Illinois’ unemployment rate of 4.8 percent in January is considerably higher than the national unemployment rate of 3.7 percent. Recent numbers have shown that Illinois has higher unemployment numbers than all of its neighboring states.”
A lifeline may come from Springfield, where a handful of Chicago-area state representatives will push to revive the program with the backing of Republican colleagues. Their proposed legislation could extend the program for five years. It would also reduce the tax credit amount and individual giving cap from $1 million to $500,000, sharpen the focus on lower-income students, and shrink it to a $50 million program.
One item being considered would allow families to ask for a new investigation in a cold case. The second would force law enforcement to publish data related to homicides and investigations — including how many are solved. State Rep. Kam Buckner says both pieces of legislation will work toward building trust between the community and police — and give victims’ families a chance at getting the justice the deserve.
Thousands of migrants expected to be evicted from shelters soon after March 16. As of Monday, city officials said there are 13,442 residents in 28 active shelters. As that deadline looms, Venezuelan Alfonso Carvajal wrestles with the long list of obstacles that have come up during the apartment search process. He doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t have a work permit, a credit history or a bank account.
The Police Department has increased police presence at some schools, but Arne Duncan, a South Sider and former leader of CPS, said he “wouldn’t call it a security failure…These are absences of relationships, these are absences of positive role models. It’s not a situational issue. I think that way oversimplifies it. This is a structural gap here. And we got to be honest about it and work with real urgency.”
The grant program is part of the Evidence-Based Funding for Student Success Act. It lets school districts reduce local property taxes for two consecutive years and replace that revenue with state funds. The $49.3 million in fiscal year 2024 grants will result in $54.2 million in property tax relief for Illinois residents. A district’s grant amount becomes a permanent part of its EBF Base Funding Minimum going forward.
The number of people that enrolled from Illinois increased by 16%, according to Dana Popish Severinghaus, director of the Illinois Department of Insurance.
“…(T)he Illinois Local Journalism Task Force, created by legislation in 2021, is betting on the dinosaurs, that is, traditional media. Last week, the task force issued its recommendations for journalism in the Prairie State. ‘Its proposals are mostly about getting taxpayers to pony up and putting government in control,’ Mark Glennon says in Wirepoints, ‘[with] no mention of journalism’s own failures.'”
A wide range of consumer protection laws took effect in Illinois at the beginning of the year, including some that are based on recent high-profile crimes and tragedies. One new law, the Digital Forgeries Act, allows consumers to sue, if they are the target of “deep fakes” or digitally altered sexual images.
The actor, who is Black and gay, has claimed he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in Streeterville in 2019. He was eventually convicted on five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021, and was sentenced to 150 days in jail. He spent only six days in custody before he was released while he appealed his case.
“I actually think it’s quite fitting that we are in this wonderful small business because it has been Black and brown small businesses that have stepped up in this moment, in this crisis, to respond to these families who are arriving here,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said. By the end of last year, the Greater Chicago Food Depository and its contracted restaurants served 18,000 daily meals across 21 city shelters.
At 66.5 cents per gallon, Illinois motorists can expect to pay $325 a year in state gas taxes alone based on American Petroleum Institute gas usage estimates. Illinois has had automatic annual gas tax hikes since 2019 when Gov. JB Pritzker and state lawmakers doubled it and built in automatic increases tied to inflation, with the next one coming July 1.
“The Biden administration recently shut down an effort spearheaded by Big Tech to use trade negotiations to override Congress’ efforts to end mega-platforms’ abuses of workers and consumers. Corporate lobbyists are now engaging in an all-out assault to try to bully and intimidate the administration into reversing course.”
The former police chief’s lawsuit is just the latest litigation launched against the village and Mayor Tiffany Henyard in recent months. Henyard has also been sued by a tavern for withholding their liquor license over politics, and she has been sued by Dolton’s village clerk and members of the board of trustees, who accused her of refusing to follow state laws, of lavish personal spending of taxpayer money and of using Dolton Police as her personal security, among a list of other corruption allegations.
“The frustration with this migrant crime is really, I think, going to boil over,” retired Riverside Police Chief Tom Weitzel said. “You can pull up any article and see that some of these migrants are being arrested three and four and five times, over and over again, and released to commit more crime. … It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s a revolving door. And the police officers are saying, ‘Just forget it. Why bother? Why bother even making the arrest?’”
Wirepoints has warned Illinois universities, especially U of I, to get ahead of the surging anti-woke backlash. To eliminate or pare down their DEI programs before they face wrath of unhappy donors and Americans fed up with “woke” excess. Unfortunately, there seems to be no evidence of a pullback. The university is still employing dozens of DEI admins with salaries in the six-figure range.
While it’s still too early to know if the concerns regarding the SAFE-T Act are true, there are three data points that are already a cause for concern. Jail populations are shrinking. The number of defendants on electronic monitoring are down. And appeals against detention orders have skyrocketed.
The Chicago Teachers Union represents 48 members and staff serving 600 students at Instituto Justice Leadership Academy and Instituto Health and Science Career Academy. Their demands include better staffing levels for special education; fair wages that would address the school’s bilingual and special education shortage; and sanctuary protections for immigrant students and employees.
While Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez said, “We need to scrutinize the federal government,” on the other side of the issue, Ald. Nicholas Sposato said there should have been a different approach where the City Council would not have been divided. “This should’ve never gotten to this point that it did. It should’ve been a sit down between Debra (Silverstein) and Rosanna (Rodriguez-Sanchez) and work something out.”
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